“Shakespeare and Practical Faith”
This essay highlights a strain of thinking that has proven oddly underexplored in theatre scholarship: the philosophy of action. In particular, I propose reviving interest in the question of intentional action: when is behavior intentional? How can we evaluate one’s intentions, and how can we judge our own? The early modern theatre gives us particularly rich terrain for this kind of inquiry. The dramaturgy of the era capitalized on instances of communal or individual intention clashing with misapprehension, chance, and other obstacles. The same set of conditions might apply to the theatre today—indeed, “intention” supplies a key word for contemporary Western acting theory—but for a key difference: in the spiritual landscape of premodern Europe, one’s intentions were always enmeshed with a form of Providence, a higher power whose intentions could be obscured at best. And in post-Reformation England, the belief that divinity’s intention had a role in individual action was taken as an act of faith. How then did this relinquishment of individual intention play out in scenes of early modern theatricality? And how could this vulnerability be misread by others as passivity or even nihilism? My paper takes up scenes from Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night to suggest that acting in early modernity functioned less as a secular craft and more as a form of prayer—or, to twist Aquinas’s notion of practical reasoning, a form of “practical faith.” My primary interlocutor, alongside early modern theological and theatrical sources, is the work of G.E.M. Anscombe. Anscombe’s work, engaged as it is with blurring the line between mental preparation and physical embodiment, supplies us with a bracingly apposite framework for rethinking Shakespeare’s words. I propose a model of early modern intention not reliant on assured individual action nor complete abstraction but instead on an embodied, shared, tenuous desire for a futurity out of one’s hands. The talk will conclude with a consideration of the ethical dimensions of practical faith, in light of Anscombe’s own peace activism.
