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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2007
In an article castigating those modern critics who wish to interpret Shakespeare’s tragedies in Christian terms and to see Othello and Lear in particular saved, Sylvan Barnet observes that to extend the lives of characters beyond the play into the next world is just as much an error as the old fault of reconstructing their career before the play begins; he continues:
Shakespeare presents such full worlds that it is possible with a little ingenuity and effort to find in him almost any theory which the researcher wishes to discover.
If it is possible to discern a devout Shakespeare, it is also possible to shape out a pagan Shakespeare, or even, according to Paul Arnold, a Rosicrucian Shakespeare. He believes that in Esotérisme de Shakespeare he is revealing for the first time the true meaning of the last plays and several comedies, as expressions of a cabalistic philosophy, which, it seems, was the major preoccupation of the Elizabethan élite, and the sole genuine interest of all the poets and dramatists.
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