Shakespeare References in God Is Not Great

Christopher Hitchens’ God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything contains several Shakespeare references. The first couple are to Shakespeare himself. Hitchens writes, “We are not immune to the lure of wonder and mystery and awe: we have music and art and literature, and find that serious ethical dilemmas are better handled by Shakespeare and Tolstoy and Schiller and Dostoyevsky and George Eliot than in the mythical morality tales of the holy books” (p. 5).And then: “The next time I got married, which was by a Reform Jewish rabbi with an Einsteinian and Shakespearean bent, I had something a little more in common with the officiating person” (p. 16). A little later, he refers to King Lear: “Nothing optional – from homosexuality to adultery – is ever made punishable unless those who do the prohibiting (and exact the fierce punishments) have a repressed desire to participate. As Shakespeare put it in King Lear, the policeman who lashes the whore has a hot need to use her for the very offense for which he plies the lash” (p. 40). The book also contains a couple of references to Hamlet. Hitchens writes, “Ever since they were forced to take part in this argument, which they were with great reluctance, the religious have tried to echo Hamlet’s admonition to Horatio that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of by mere humans” (p. 80). And then: “‘What a piece of work is a man!’ as Hamlet exclaims, before going on to contradict himself somewhat by describing the result as a ‘quintessence of dust’; both statements having the merit of being true” (p. 85). He then mentions Shakespeare again: “It does not matter to me whether Homer was one person or many, or whether Shakespeare was a secret Catholic or a closet agnostic. I should not feel my own world destroyed if the greatest writer about love and tragedy and comedy and morals was finally revealed to have been the Earl of Oxford all along, though I must add that sole authorship is important to me and I would be saddened and diminished to learn that Bacon had been the man. Shakespeare has much more moral salience than the Talmud or the Koran or any account of the fearful squabbles of Iron Age tribes” (pages 150-151).

God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything was published in 2007. The copy I read (from the library) was published in 2009, and included a new afterword.