Primrose Road

During my weekly scan for all things Shakespeare on the WWW, I came across a "God created the earth because the Torah says so" article that not only aligns creationists with "evolutionists" on the basis of what the author calls a " 'something from something' orthodoxy" but also invokes Shakespeare to explain a Torah-based "something from nothing" principle. Chasidic readings of Torah are often rather poetic and profound (though in my view, of course, not objectively 'true'). Except here, the essay writer seems to base his understanding of both God and Shakespeare on a Romantic/Freudian view of author-as-creator. After explaining the ways in which God thinks the world into existence, the essayist turns to Shakespeare's 'writing process' as a means of explaining this abstract concept:

"Shakespeare dreamt up King Lear. In order to get King Lear where Shakespeare wanted him, namely as a foolish old man, Shakespeare did not have to imagine his birth, weaning, adolescence, and middle years. Shakespeare's King Lear is not the product of a series of somethings, e.g., an indulgent, permissive mother, poor social skills as a teenager, and so on. Rather, he is the product of nothing: Shakespeare's unfettered creative intellect."

King Lear is not "the product of nothing": his story comes from Holinshed's Chronicles. While the play's fully fleshed-out subplot was quite an innovation at the time, the subplot's story is borrowed from Sidney's Arcadia. Yes, Shakespeare did not have to imagine Lear's childhood (as some writers and actors might be encouraged to do with their characters today), but he is surely not a product of "Shakespeare's unfettered creative intellect." He is a product of Shakespeare's carefully stitching together previous work; he is a product of the work of actors and theater managers. Contrary to what the (highly entertaining) film Shakespeare in Love suggests, Shakespeare did not pull his story ideas and characters out of the ether, from "nothing." Which gets me wondering: was there an equivalent to "creationism" in the Early Modern Era, prior to the emergence of the notion of individualist "creativity"? What would God-as-creator have meant to the Early Moderns?