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Whereas traditional scholarship assumed that William Shakespeare used the medieval past as a negative foil to legitimate the present, Shakespeare, Catholicism, and the Middle Ages offers a revisionist perspective, arguing that the playwright valorizes the Middle Ages in order to critique the oppressive nature of the Tudor-Stuart state. In examining Shakespeare’s Richard II, The Merchant of Venice, Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, and The Winter’s Tale, the text explores how Shakespeare repossessed the medieval past to articulate political and religious dissent. By comparing these and other plays by Shakespeare’s contemporaries with their medieval analogues, Alfred Thomas argues that Shakespeare was an ecumenical writer concerned with promoting tolerance in a highly intolerant and partisan age 1. Introduction: Maimed Rights in Shakespeare’s England -- 2. Pride and Penitence: Political and Moral Allegory in Medieval Arthurian Romance and Richard II -- 3. Demonizing the Other: “The Prioress’s Tale,” The Jew of Malta, and The Merchant of Venice -- 4. Writing, Memory, and Revenge in Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and Hamlet -- 5. Afterlives of the Martyrs: King Lear, The Duchess of Malfi, and The Virgin Martyr -- 6. “Remember the Porter”: Memorializing the Medieval Drama and the Gunpowder Plot in Macbeth -- 7. Conclusion: Shakespeare “Our Contemporary”
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