William Shakespeare has fallen on hard times. Studies of top universities’ curricula reveal that few still require English majors to take courses on the Bard. Many consider his “old-fashioned language” to be “too difficult” for Gen Z students’ social media-addled attention spans. Others are ditching Shakespeare to “make room for modern, diverse, and inclusive voices.”

Two books published late last year, however, take a different, more appreciative approach to exploring two different facets of Shakespeare’s character. R. V. Young’s Shakespeare and the Idea of Western Civilization gives readers a sense of Shakespeare as a poet of tradition, whereas the late Nalin Ranasinghe’s Shakespeare’s Reformation: Christian Humanism and the Death of God gives readers a sense of Shakespeare as a poet of liberty.

Although a definite tension exists between Young and Ranasinghe’s interpretations, they both capture essential elements of Shakespeare’s writing. He was a poet of both tradition and liberty—and that is why his poetry forms the foundation of the modern Western mind.

The Bard and the West

Shakespeare and the Idea of Western Civilization (reviewed last year for Law & Liberty) is the crowning achievement of a lifetime of scholarship. R. V. Young, a professor of English emeritus at North Carolina State University, is one of America’s foremost experts on Shakespeare. The essays collected here represent the fruits of decades of labor.

In the foreword, Young sets his position in contrast with another eminent Shakespearean, Harold Bloom. Bloom taught that Shakespeare “invented the human” and represents a great shift in consciousness; Young, on the other hand, holds that Shakespeare does not break with the earlier Western tradition but rather exemplifies it. His poetry “embodies the unique complexity” of Western society—and that continuity is, for Young, the source of Shakespeare’s enduring relevance.

Young is rightly concerned, though, that the contemporary academy’s contempt for authority has produced little except desiccated Shakespeare scholarship. Postmodernism, critical theory, and other nihilistic academic trends lead many who professionally study Shakespeare into realms of strange obsessions. Rather than wrestle with the words he wrote, he is too often treated as a source or expression of sexism, racism, and imperialism.

But instead of refuting postmodern interpretations, Young chose to counter the critics by expositing Shakespeare’s plays. “My hope is to provide a model of humanistic education, of teaching in the liberal arts,” he writes, “insofar as the study of Shakespeare is a part of the enterprise, especially in the English-speaking world.” In large part, Young succeeds in this mission. These essays are shining examples of what serious literary scholarship ought to be.

Young situates Shakespeare within what he calls the “crisis of the Reformation.” As Protestants upended the social and religious order of Europe, it seemed like the very ideas Christendom was built on were thrown into the air. In Young’s telling, Shakespeare’s great task as a poet and a philosopher was to recover these ideas and imbue them with new authority for a new generation.

When Young speaks of “Western civilization,” he means a “dual Roman and Christian heritage.” Mixing together, these sources provide an authoritative account of human flourishing. In a time when all authority was being questioned, Young contends, Shakespeare reasserted the case for traditional virtues through his drama.

According to Young, this Western ideal of human flourishing is primarily spiritual. In Othello, for example, Young contends Shakespeare imbues the titular Moor, a man born outside of Christendom, with all the “highest virtues” of the West to “remind us that the essence of Western civilization is a matter of the mind and the heart, not outward appearance or blood inheritance.” The villainous Iago, however, is “a threat to Western civilization, not its exemplar,” because he embraces an acidic nihilism that regards the very virtues Othello embodies as mere words. Iago rejects the spiritual realities of the West. For Young, the contrast between Othello and Iago is the contrast between tradition and postmodernism—and the tragedy of the play is that postmodernism succeeds in undermining tradition.

Shakespeare’s comedies are comedies, in Young’s view, because authority prevails and the human characters flourish. His tragedies are tragedies because authority fails and the human characters wither. In depicting both potential outcomes, Shakespeare seems to be asking his audience to reconsider their ideas about what is best for the human person. In a time of chaos and upheaval, Shakespeare reminded a nation of their roots.

Ultimately, Young concludes, Shakespeare re-founds Western civilization by showing the need for authority and shapes the modern world through the strength of his writing:

What makes Shakespeare a great poet and dramatist—a great creator of literary fictions rather than a political theorist—is that he embodies ideas about politics and morals (and everything else) in concrete situations peopled by individual characters, who seem so real and alive that we can discuss them as if we knew them. One might even maintain that, in some ways, we do know them better than many of the actual men and women in our lives.

By capturing human life so fully with words, Shakespeare himself becomes an authority to Young. The Bard is more than a mere writer; he is a philosopher in the fullest sense of the word. His insights into human nature and the Western tradition command a certain respect, even deference. For Young, one could argue Shakespeare’s works hold almost the power of revelation.

One hopes that a new generation of students will be inspired by Young’s and Ranasinghe’s scholarship and discover for themselves the greatness of William Shakespeare.

The Bard and the Renaissance

Shakespeare’s Reformation is, unfortunately, an incomplete book. Nalin Ranasinghe, who was professor of philosophy at Assumption College, died in 2020. The book was compiled from unfinished work and notes by editor Lee Oser. Nonetheless, Shakespeare’s Reformation possesses great intellectual force—it is truly a memorial to its author’s scholarship.

Ranasinghe’s central thesis is that Shakespeare is the Renaissance’s greatest champion. The Renaissance was a great intellectual movement to put the human person at the center of Europe’s political and cultural life, liberating the people from political oppression and, at the same time, reintroducing them to the classical philosophical tradition. In this context, Ranasinghe holds that Shakespeare’s plays offer “an esoteric vindication of the human soul itself,” the heart of the Renaissance, “against the looming backdrop of the Counter-Reformation in Europe and the Puritan perversion of English Anglicanism.” In his “re-telling of Classical and English history,” Ranasinghe argues, “Shakespeare is thus tying poetry to history and giving us an alternate, if playful, account of Western civilization.”

Ranasinghe posits that Shakespeare’s political project is a defense of the English Renaissance “against a three-headed threat: the old Church’s blind ossified corruption, the wily but uneasy Machiavellian statecraft of his own time, and the fanatical fundamentalism of the future.” In his critiques of Roman Catholics and Puritans alike, Ranasinghe suggests Shakespeare understood—and perhaps even predicted—the factional conflict which would lead to a bloody civil war 26 years after Shakespeare’s death.

From the Renaissance perspective Shakespeare adopts, according to Ranasinghe, the biggest problem with the Roman Catholic Church is its claim to absolute power. In the play King John, for instance, representatives from Rome treat fellow men like animals that must be ruled with force by popes and kings. Shakespeare dramatically depicts the way these claims contradict the notion that reasoned speech or friendship are the basis of a just politics.

At the same time, though, the most radical Protestants went too far in denouncing Rome. Ranasinghe says that Puritans adopted an “incendiary fundamentalism” and a “theocratic persuasion” little different from the most authoritarian aspects of Roman tyranny. Rather than a single king or pope, however, Puritan radicalism hands absolute power over to the unruly mobs seen in Julius Caesar or Henry VI, Part 2.

Ranasinghe suggests, then, Shakespeare’s humanistic vision for politics consists in dethroning all forms of absolute power. Whether exercised by a tyrant or a mob or an oligarchic junto, absolute power is inimical to the common good. It perverts its wielders and degrades society. It violates the precepts of classical philosophy and the new covenant of love announced in Christ’s gospel. In his tragedies and histories, Shakespeare dramatically depicts over and over again the corrupting grip absolute power holds on tyrants, oligarchs, and demagogues—and the bloody consequences of unlimited authority.

But Shakespeare does not leave his audience without an alternative to absolute power. Analyzing Antony and Cleopatra, Ranasinghe concludes that Shakespeare is attempting to teach us “[j]ust as beauty saves the world, truly human life is sustained by a transcendent cosmic order that gives grace to live nobly and die well. This is why we must renounce raw power and forsake its perverse pleasure.” The love shared by the title characters shows, as Antony says in a memorable monologue, that “Kingdoms are clay.”

The play “Antony and Cleopatra urges us,” Ranasinghe argues,

to choose sacrificial love over Pyrrhic victory. A polis affirming equality and linking Platonic Eros to Christ’s gospel is the basis for the best commonwealth; here, instead of calling men doomed sinners, to be ruled like prodigal pigs, we see true beauty and find happiness in bringing out the best in each other. … By rejecting misanthropic self-hatred, a condition all too easily abused by priests, and affirming the possibility of living well on the earth, the play preserves Christian humanism, the true meaning of the Renaissance, and conveys it to a world still ruled by Rome’s false gods: generation, greed, and globalization.

Ranasinghe’s Shakespearean politics holds that the common good must be grounded in human freedom. The chief characteristic of the human soul is its ability to love, and Ranasinghe believes Shakespeare rejects the notion that any central authority is competent to direct and order a soul’s loves. Power must always be limited, then, to preserve freedom and the possibility of love.

Authority and Liberty in King Lear

It would seem that Young and Ranasinghe offer conflicting interpretations of Shakespeare—and conflicting political principles. Young emphasizes Shakespeare’s debt to medieval Christendom and his allegiance to authority. Ranasinghe emphasizes Shakespeare’s debt to the early modern Renaissance and his defense of liberty. Though tension certainly exists, the two perspectives are in fact complementary. Nowhere is this more apparent than in both writers’ treatments of perhaps Shakespeare’s great tragedy, King Lear.

In Act I, Lear’s disguised servant Kent comes to serve him in his banishment. When the dethroned, destitute king asks him why he will serve, Kent replies to Lear, “You have that in your countenance which I would fain call master.” When Lear inquires further, Kent tells him that he possesses “Authority.” Kent’s display of loyalty here, and throughout the play, is one of the most moving depictions of human goodness in all of Shakespeare’s works. Kent is the moral heart of King Lear because Young interprets this scene as an affirmation of traditional natural law. Although he notes that they “by no means observe their principles perfectly,” most of the characters around Lear affirm “that objective moral norms are built into the structure of human nature and the reality of the human condition.” Goneril, Regan, and Edmund are the villains of the play because they subvert this authority and attempt to seize “raw power” for themselves.

Ranasinghe interprets the politics of King Lear slightly differently. He believes the tragedy begins when Lear begins to abuse his authority. In dividing the kingdom the way he does, Lear adopts a “royal absolutism” and an elevated status as a “God-King” which “denies the dignity, freedom and very humanity of all other human beings.” Ranasinghe detects in Lear’s tyrannical behavior “a kind of back-door nihilism” which endangers the kingdom. “Absolute monarchs who proclaim that ‘error has no rights’ suffer from a hubris that blinds all who posit it,” Ranasinghe says, which “leads them to commit massive acts of moral excess that cannot be ignored.”

Ultimately, though, the tension between these two interpretations, the tension between authority and liberty, reveals the essential greatness of Western civilization. More than any other culture, the West has discovered creative ways to balance the claims of these principles. Tradition provides guardrails to prevent freedom from becoming anarchy, and a concern for liberty prevents order from becoming tyrannical. King Lear dramatizes the tragedy which arises when a kingdom forgets both of these principles—and in doing reminds us to maintain the enduring tension between them.

Young and Ranasinghe’s accomplished books are an occasion to remember why literary criticism is so essential to a well-function academy. “We must always hold ourselves ready to consummate life by being open to more spiritual growth,” Ranasinghe writes in his chapter on Lear. We should study Shakespeare’s plays because “only a truly high culture can go past playing with power and use the fullest insights of its richest souls.”

At one point in his book, R. V. Young writes that “[s]ound literary criticism will not save the world, but it can play a significant role in education, in leading young minds to an appreciation of the subtle wisdom of the idea of Western civilization as embodied in the drama of William Shakespeare.” Despite the tension between his thesis and Ranasinghe’s, both books are exactly this sort of sound literary criticism.

The Bard’s plays can change lives. He deserves critics like Young and Ranasinghe who take him seriously, and who appreciate and love his work. One hopes that a new generation of students will be inspired by their scholarship and discover for themselves the greatness of William Shakespeare.