JOSEPH BOTTUM: Neil Gaiman’s Dream of Blood.

The word gospel occurs only once in Shakespeare—and that, as a participle, when Macbeth sneers at the hesitating murderers and asks, “Are you so gospel’d” that you would hesitate to strike down Banquo and his son?

The brilliant literary critic Paul Cantor suggests we pay careful attention whenever Shakespeare’s plays are located in borderlands: the Cyprus of Othello, set between Europe and Africa, for example, or the Elsinore of Hamlet, caught between the rough manners of rural Denmark and the Renaissance sophistication of the German universities. And so, Cantor points out, with Macbeth’s Scotland. To the northeast lie the Orkney Islands (and, beyond them, Scandinavia), where names like Thorfinn Raven-Feeder are found among praiseworthy rulers. And to the south lies England, where names like Edward the Confessor are given to reverent kings.

Or, to put the matter more exactly: The Norse gods of the Vikings press on one side of the play, while the Christian Trinity presses on the other. And the line between them doesn’t just run through the middle of Scotland. It runs through the middle of Macbeth himself, a half-gospel’d pagan, and his wife. The line between the blood-red dreamscape of the Norseman and the gospel runs through the play.

This is not the only way to interpret Macbeth, of course, but Cantor’s thesis proves fruitful. If nothing else, it reminds us that the 16th-century Shakespeare lived at a time when the eighth- to 10th-century sea-wolves, and the Christianizing of the Northern Europeans, were still living history. These days, we tend to forget what Shakespeare’s audiences could remember—that, right or wrong as a matter of cosmic truth, Christianity was the historical solution to something brutal, violent, and murderous in the winter souls of the pagan invaders, from the Germanic tribes to the Rus. Christianity was the answer to the universal problem that in England manifested itself most clearly with the Norseman. The Church was both the theoretical and practical resolution to the challenge of the Vikings.

Frankly, Europe could take a few lessons from the Vikings, these days. And the Church is — in MacBeth’s sense, if in no other — over-gospel’d these days.