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Citizen-Saints: Shakespeare and Political Theology.

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Citizen-Saints: Shakespeare and Political Theology By Julia Reinhard Lupton Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2005

There are all sorts of ways to become a citizen, and several ways to become a saint; and these, as Julia Reinhard Lupton shows in her elegant new book, need not be mutually exclusive. "Citizen-saints," in Lupton's epithet, are "figures who dwell in the frontier between the sacred and the profane; figures who, by virtue of embracing or embodying superceded historical and religious positions, become unlikely portents of social formations to come" (13). These include Saint Paul and Antigone, Marlowe's Barabas and Milton's Samson, Shakespeare's Shylock, Othello, Isabella and Caliban, and, ultimately, Shakespeare himself. The citizen-saint, in Lupton's definition, is one "who invests the regular intervals of citizenship with the ongoing potential for radical singularity" (140). All these exemplary figures embody radical exceptions to norms of universalization and naturalization--the norms of citizenship, which are marked by what Lupton terms a "salutary insufficiency" (208): "Citizenship as a category is both rooted in local practice, in the life of a polis or city with its own institutions, and embodies a standard that breaks away from its particular instantiations precisely because its formal definition does not gather into its reach all aspects of social life" (213). While "citizenship can offer a provisional ground of equivalence and a forum for deliberation and compromise for persons from diverse groups without equating politics with particular religious, cultural, or sexual identities" (210), it comes at a cost--that of shedding a vital part of one's previous affiliations, familial, tribal, religious, ethnic, and so on. And it is in this shedding--a kind of mortification or sacrifice, as Lupton describes it--that one nears the status of sainthood, at precisely the moment that one is moving into citizenship.

In approaching the ambiguous embrace of the polity--through ceremonies of conversion, manumission, marriage, or naturalization--the characters Lupton analyzes lose a substantial portion of their allegiances to the local habits and habitations of their origins. One of Lupton's main interests here is the relation between the universalized and the localized, the dominant polis and the various locales within or beside it in which these figures have lived out their prior identities: the ghetto, the wilderness, the convent, the desert, the island. Hence, for example, the importance of Venice...

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