Shakespeare on Chastity

The always insightful Anthony Esolen has a superb piece on the First Things page today defending the controversial theses that Shakespeare was “a profoundly Christian playwright” and that he was a rigorous advocate of male chastity, for Shakespeare “as near to an absolute value as it is possible for a virtue to be.”

That second thesis sounds counterintuitive.  We’ve all been told about Shakespeare’s bawdy humor, even if we don’t get it.  But Esolen makes a remarkably thorough case for the thesis in a small space.  Comparing Shakespeare to both pagan and Renaissance writers, Esolen argues that “Nothing in Shakespeare corresponds to the reveling in sensuality that we find in these poets (much less in such scabrous writers as Pietro Aretino), and that is all the more remarkable given his earthiness and bawdy humor. But the acid test is not so much his exaltation of chaste young women and faithful wives, though that is never subjected to even a shade of irony, as his surprising admiration for male chastity, and the severity with which he treats sins against it.”

See the whole thing here: http://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2010/05/desires-run-not-before-honor