Trope and Allegory Themes Common to Dante and Shakespeare [Paperback]

FRANCIS FERGUSSON was the University Professor of Comparative Literature at Rutgers University. He is the author of numerous books including The Human Image in Dramatic Literature and Shakespeare: The Pattern in His Carpet.At odds with the view that Shakespeare was a religious skeptic who only paid lip service to religious beliefs to pacify his less perceptive audience, Francis Fergusson investigates a relationship between Shakespeare and Dante, whom he sees as writing out of the same classical Christian heritage. Fergusson explores analogous themes from several Shakespearean plays and parts of Dante’s Divine Comedy. These themes are romantic love and faith in it; treachery and its recognition; a commonsense view of secular government and a belief in the necessity of right rule for right government; and poetry as evidence of things not seen and its relation to religious belief.

The old and new materials integrated in this compact volume give us the author’s profoundest insights, informed by long years of appreciative study, into correspondences between Dante and Shakespeare. . . . There can be no doubt as to the basic value of Fergusson’s comparative analysis—one that mirrors the kind of competence which is the sine qua non of the true expert in the comparative study of literature.

At odds with the view that Shakespeare was a religious skeptic who only paid lip service to religious beliefs to pacify his less perceptive audience, Francis Fergusson investigates a relationship between Shakespeare and Dante, whom he sees as writing out of the same classical Christian heritage.