Shakespeare on Sacraments

In their essay on the Eucharist in Cultural Reformations, David Aers and Sarah Beckwith notes that “one of the central images in the exhortations to Holy Communion in the Book of Common Prayer and also in the ‘Homily of the Worthy Reception’ is the image of the heavenly banquet where all must be guests ‘and not gazers, eaters and not lookers.’” And they find a dramatization of this image in Shakespeare’s Tempest (163).

“In Act 3, Scene 3 of The Tempest, several ‘strange shapes’ bring in a banquet, on which Alonso proposes to feed. But Ariel, by means of a ‘quaint device,’ causes it to vanish and confronts them with their own sin: ‘But remember/(For that’s my business to you) that you three/From Milan did supplant good Prospero’ (3.3.68–70). The prospective feast becomes an act of remembrance, restoring a memory of themselves that disbars participation until that memory has restored them to repentance. The feast depends on being in ‘charity’—and this will mean avowals, heart’s sorrow, a relinquishment of the usurped fruits of past ill deeds and a restoration of the relations such acts have damaged through forgiveness. Here the work of theatre supports the work of the mass in a substitution of haunting power and equivocation—for the feast can only be realized in those relations of charity. Without them it is insubstantial” (163). A substantive Eucharist doesn’t depend here on the confection of the sacrament by a priest, but on the charitable disposition of the participants.

For theologians as for Shakespeare, the Eucharist “is judge as well as redeemer. It is diagnostic. What it shows is the shape of sin.” And this is precisely what the feast of The Tempest shows up: “That is why Ariel’s business is as a reminder to the sinners of what they are. In The Tempest the possibilities of sitting down and eating together are going to depend on the art of memory in the activity of forgiveness. Indeed the fundamental premise of this play is that memory is communal: that it cannot be the possession of any one person alone” (165).

Aers and Beckwith suggests that “Here we have finally moved away from the Aristotelian language of substance that had controlled Eucharistic discussion for so long, to a language of participation” (163). According to the authors, the very secularization of the theater allows Shakespeare to bring out these larger Eucharistic themes: “On Shakespeare’s stage all discussion of religious subjects, and any explicit mention of God, or Christ, or the ministry of the national church, is legally out of bounds. Paradoxically, this frees the Shakespearean stage (as here in The Tempest) to take up and allude to the participatory forms of his culture, forms so often compromised or vitiated by coercion, torture, and violence that to call them participatory is to make a mockery of the language” (165). Forced out by the form of eucharistic debates, “Eucharistic longings and their dreams of reconciliation . . . migrate to the stage, allusively, yet tangibly, and to other places of contemplation, scrutiny, and relative safety” (165), where it becomes possible to recover the wide-angle Augustinian understanding of the Eucharistic feast.