Piero Boitani is a highly regarded comparatist whose learned, lifelong work on Homer, the scriptures, and Dante informs his intriguing new study of Shakespeare’s romances, The Gospel According to Shakespeare. Since the late plays “all have a happy ending,” they not only constitute a last will and testament for the playwright, but also “his good news, his Gospel … the New Testament of William Shakespeare” (1). In one of the book’s most insightful connections, Boitani traces the roots of these late plays to King Lear. Lear’s fantasy of skipping off to prison with his beloved daughter Cordelia to “pray, and sing, and tell old tales” and to “take upon [themselves] the mystery of things as if they were God’s spies” proves painfully doomed, but Boitani convincingly shows how the romances embrace and exalt these “old tales” (xi–xii), making them come true. Less persuasive are his claims that Shakespeare himself becomes “a spy of God … who on God’s behalf explores the human spirit,” seeking “insight into God’s own intimate being” (132) and preaching redemption through patient endurance of suffering and death (4).

Boitani refrains from theological analysis and speculation about Shakespeare’s own religious convictions, but he does suggest a strong scriptural and Christian influence on a wide range of plays. Hamlet not only notes “a special providence in the fall of a sparrow,” but also, as Boitani astutely suggests, his determination to “Let be” is a variant of “amen” (20–21). At points these scriptural parallels seem more vague and tenuous: Pericles resembles “Jesus of the Gospels” because he “accepts telos” (46). Mourners of Imogen, disguised as Fidele and presumed dead, “recite a dirge, as if they were the women in traditional scenes of lamentation over the dead Christ” (62). Hermione’s tomb “is now empty, like Jesus of Nazareth’s after three days” (84). And Prospero’s use of the present tense to identify himself as “lord” of Milan is said to repeat “the Old and New Testament formula for divine identification” (111). Portentous abstractions and Greek and Latin terminology supplant convincing argument when he says The Winter’s Tale celebrates “the pulchritudo of being, the clarity, as in Perdita’s case, of the tode-ti, of being-this now” (127).

Boitani’s discussion of art’s rapturous power is the book’s greatest strength. He shrewdly observes that Leontes “wavers between ecstasy and an awareness of art’s illusion” (83) at the conclusion of The Winter’s Tale. He also pursues the second half of Hamlet’s question about the Player King — “What’s Hecuba to him, or he to her?” — in order to explore drama’s “radical, ontological” energy by asking, “What is a man made of flesh and blood to an imaginary character?” (14). Ordinary actors and spectators can indeed be dwarfed by such legendary figures as Hecuba or Hamlet, and art can acquire force greater than dull actuality. Boitani goes on to say that if we can believe in these characters “through the ‘suspension of disbelief’ that Coleridge says is necessary for the fruition of art … then Shakespeare would seem to suggest that we can also believe in the resurrection of the dead, the mystery and miracle preached by Christianity” (85). Here his sense of art’s powers lapses into what has been called “spilt religion” as does his baffling contention that, like the evangelist John, “Shakespeare does everything to make us believe that he is divinely inspired” (54). Boitani invokes Platonic ideas of a divine furor poeticus cited by Sir Philip Sidney in his Apology for Poetry as a basis for such lofty aspirations (131), and he concludes that Shakespeare, “enchanted by astonishment and inspired by heaven, sings wonderful and ‘unknown’ things, uttering veiled truths” (131–32). This blurs Sidney’s careful distinction between David’s divinely inspired psalms and the work of those he deems “right” poets, bound by no higher power than their own wit. Boitani’s enthusiasm for Shakespeare’s accomplishment is eloquent and infectious, and he describes him as a “magician, demiurge, poet, creator” (123). Yet ultimately, Shakespeare’s most remarkable accomplishments are entirely human rather than mystical or divine or even semidivine. Like Prospero, he astonishes us even more by relinquishing any claim to magical powers and acknowledging, “what strength I have’s mine own.”