Shakespeare and the Bible

I am fascinated with discovery that someone has taken it upon himself to accomplish something I had put on the back burner for many years. During my college days, I studied Shakespeare in the only way that one possibly can. At least the results were positive. Somewhat of a thespian, I would open to the text and verbally act out the parts while trying to visualize the characters and what they were portraying. This worked pretty well, at least while I was still single. However, I became a Christian, during this period of study and was simultaneously studying the Bible. I was able to absorb enough scripture to be able to recognize it in the writings of Shakespeare. I was sure that the literal voice I heard in the works of Shakespeare was at least schooled in the wisdom of scripture. It distracted me so that it came out in some of my term papers, which did not always set well with my professors, who were looking for the more canned answers prescribed through their many lectures. I have always thought that I would like to draw the parallel, and am delighted to find that someone will have soon accomplished it for me.

I, for one, am going to keep my eyes open for a new book, to be published by Oxford University Press in February 2000, called "Kiss the Book: A Study of Shakespeare and the Bible."

In that I could not possibly do a better job of describing the book than the author, Steven Marx of Cal Poly University, the following is an the introduction he offered through the internet. I cannot say that I support all that he says in the introduction, in that there is evidence that he believes the Bible contains mythological stories, and I believe they are true. I subscribe to the scholarly approach he is taking in this book and I hope it will allow me to put the Works of Shakespeare on my list of suggested reading for homeschoolers.

Professor Marx wrote -------------------------------------

"The project of a book on Shakespeare and the Bible is timely if not overdue. A number of prominent scholars, including Northrop Frye, Frank Kermode and Harold Bloom, have produced books about Shakespeare and about the Bible, asserting the centrality of each to Western literary traditions, but none has written at length about the connections between them. Other scholars, including Wilson Knight, Roy Battenhouse, Barbara Lewalski and Louise Schleiner have illuminated parallels between single plays and selected biblical passages in short essays. But no larger scale exploration of overall relationships between Shakespeare's book and what Blake called 'The Great Code of Art' has seen the light since serious literary studies of the Bible began appearing in the early 1980's.

Although this topic deserves a major scholarly enterprise, I propose to present it in a book about 50,000 words in length aimed at a readership of undergraduates, graduate students and interested laypersons. My seven years of experience teaching introductory courses in Shakespeare and in The Bible as Literature has shown me that people who are not well versed in either can learn a great deal about both by considering how each illuminates the other. The book will digest the small body of critical work on its topic, synthesize the approaches of contemporary Shakespearean and Biblical scholarship, and present a number of interpretations that I have arrived at through earlier research.

My study will have seven chapters, each of about 8000 words. The introductory chapter will begin with a description of the subject as surviving material artifact--the Geneva Bible of 1560, the Bishops Bible of 1568, the King James Bible of 1611, and the First Folio of Shakespeare's plays of 1623. After a consideration of how the editors of each collection established unity in multiplicity, the books will be transposed into their historical contexts with a survey of the influences of the Bible in Shakespeare's culture and the wide range of interpretations formulated by his contemporaries. A discussion of William Shakespeare's probing and sometimes startling reading of the Scriptures will be informed by fragmentary external evidence, by the dense web of biblical references discoverable in the plays, and by inferences about what the Bible taught him as a writer.

All the subsequent six chapters will center on a comparison and contrast between one play and one book of the Bible. Such a method of organization will make for a series of coherent and adequately developed essays, each separately accessible and easily indexed in bibliographical databases. However, several unifying principles will help to achieve the overarching intention of exploring relationships between Shakespeare and the Bible as wholes. Topics like genre, narrative structure, characterization, register, theme and theology will recur from chapter to chapter. The selection of focus works will be representative, covering all of Shakespeare's dramatic genres--history, tragedy, comedy, and romance--and enough major books of the Old and New Testaments to give the reader a sense of moving from beginning to end of the Bible. Within each chapter, extensive reference will be made to other plays' connections with the biblical book in focus and to other biblical books relevant to the play in focus.

The first chapter following the introduction will explore relationships between The Tempest and the Book of Genesis. Both begin with a mythic creation out of stormy chaos, evoke a paradisal garden community tainted by rebellion and evil, and highlight a god/ruler/father/teacher figure who is at once author and subject. As each work moves toward conclusion, this central figure first establishes and then relinquishes control over his creatures as his mood changes from vindictive to forgiving.

The next chapter will juxtapose Henry V with Exodus, two historical epics about the birth of a nation that center upon the narrative of an underdog military victory--one at Agincourt, the other at the Red Sea. Machiavelli's view of the biblical Moses as the greatest of all heroes will provide a perspective from which to examine both works' concerns with leadership and resistance, faith and doubt in religion and politics, and the ways in which the voice of God uses and is used by those in positions of power.

Following Shakespeare's and the Bible's trajectory from history to tragedy, the next chapter will focus on King Lear and the Book of Job, where lessons are taught by storms and whirlwinds. Both are examples of 'wisdom literature,' set in remote times when gods remained distant and humans learned most through suffering. The howl of pain, rage, lament and prophecy is their dominant rhetorical mode, and they share thematic preoccupations with nothingness, nakedness, poverty, injustice, betrayal, madness, compassion, repentance, forgiveness and redemption.

The departing and returning Duke in Measure for Measure is probably modeled on the testing master of many of Jesus' parables. The next chapter will examine that play alongside the Gospel of Matthew--which provides its title-as tragicomedies. Both chronicle the efforts of a ruler to bring salvation to a corrupt society where even the most righteous lack awareness of their own hypocrisy. Only sacrifice and substitution can redeem this world, whose true nature is repeatedly obscured by a language of secrets and seeming revelations which confound those who think they are in the know.

The ensuing chapter of the book will treat The Merchant of Venice as Shakespeare's dramatic reflection on the relationship between Christians and Jews as it was expounded in Paul's letter to the Romans. Throughout the New Testament, 'The Jews' are associated with vices which Christians seek to avoid--faithlessness, legalism, greed, exploitation, envy, deception-and the two groups define one another with taunts and curses. This is the relationship between Shylock and the other Venetians. Despite the hostility between them, Paul envisions a time when the Jews will finally achieve salvation through conversion to

Christianity, just as Shylock is forced to convert to produce a comic ending of the play. Some themes to explore in both texts include gifts vs. debt-producing loans, justice vs. mercy, legality vs. morality, flesh sacrifice as debt payment, and the negotiability of sin and salvation.

The last chapter of the book will explore connections between The Tempest and The Book of Revelation. Chiliastic expectations were common when each was written--in third century Greece and Jacobean England. In addition to adopting traditional apocalyptic conventions--dream vision; the theatrum mundi trope; angelic and demonic spirits--both works draw upon conventions of theatrical and political spectacle--the masque and triumph--to realize a conclusive finale to a major body of work. Each is a palimpsest of earlier sections recollected as symbols and fragmented narratives. A predominant image is of the world as a book and the book as a world. At the end of the sixth hour, time runs out.

After the introduction, the book's first chapter will juxtapose the first play in the Folio with Genesis, and its seventh and last chapter will juxtapose Shakespeare's last complete play with Revelations. Thus the Tempest will serve as my book's Alpha and Omega, reflecting the circular structure of the Bible, which starts with the creation of heaven and earth and concludes with the creation of a new heaven and a new earth."