The Bible on the Shakespearean Stage 9781107194236, 9781108151887, 1107194237

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THE BIBLE ON THE SHAKESPEAREAN STAGE

The Bible was everywhere in Shakespeare’s England. Through sermons, catechisms, treatises, artwork, literature, and, of course, biblical reading itself, the stories and language of the Bible pervaded popular and elite culture. In recent years, scholars have demonstrated how thoroughly biblical allusions saturate Shakespearean plays. But Shakespeare’s audiences were not simply well versed in the Bible’s content – they were also steeped in the practices and methods of biblical interpretation. Reformation and counter-Reformation debate focused not just on the biblical text, but – crucially – on how to read the text. The Bible on the Shakespearean Stage is the first volume to integrate the study of Shakespeare’s plays with the vital history of Reformation practices of biblical interpretation. Bringing together the foremost international scholars in the field of Shakespeare and the Bible, these essays explore Shakespeare’s engagement with scriptural interpretation in the tragedies, histories, comedies, and romances. thomas fulton is Associate Professor of English at Rutgers University. He is the author of Historical Milton: Manuscript, Print, and Political Culture in Revolutionary England (2010), and coeditor, with Ann Baynes Coiro, of Rethinking Historicism from Shakespeare to Milton (Cambridge, 2012). kristen poole is the Blue and Gold Distinguished Professor of English Renaissance Literature at the University of Delaware. She is the author of Radical Religion from Shakespeare to Milton: Figures of Nonconformity in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2000) and Supernatural Environments in Shakespeare’s England: Spaces of Demonism, Divinity, and Drama (Cambridge, 2011).

THE BIBLE ON THE SHAKESPEAREAN STAGE Cultures of Interpretation in Reformation England

edited by THOMAS FULTON Rutgers University

KRISTEN POOLE University of Delaware

University Printing House, Cambridge cb2 8bs, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, ny 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, vic 3207, Australia 314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi –110025, India 79 Anson Road, #06–04/06, Singapore 079906 Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107194236 doi: 10.1017/9781108151887 © Cambridge University Press 2018 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2018 Printed in the United Kingdom by Clays, St Ives plc A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. isbn 978-1-107-19423-6 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

For Betsy Walsh (1953–2017) and the entire staff of the Folger Shakespeare Library, whose expertise and hospitality foster enduring scholarly community.

Contents

List of Illustrations Notes on Contributors Acknowledgments A Note on the Text

page ix x xv xvi

Introduction: Popular Hermeneutics in Shakespeare’s London

1

Thomas Fulton and Kristen Poole

i europe, england: contextualizing shakespeare’s bible 1 The Bible in Transition in the Age of Shakespeare: A European Perspective

15 17

Bruce Gordon

2 The Trouble with Translation: Paratexts and England’s Bestselling New Testament

33

Aaron T. Pratt

ii stagings: reformation reading practices in the theater 3 John 6, Measure for Measure, and the Complexities of the Literal Sense

49 51

Jay Zysk

4 Words of Diverse Significations: Hamlet’s Puns, Amphibology, and Allegorical Hermeneutics

69

Kristen Poole

5 England’s Jerusalem in Shakespeare’s Henriad Beatrice Groves vii

87

Contents

viii

6 Discontented Harmonies: Words against Words in Pomfret Castle

103

Tom Bishop

iii interplay: biblical forms and other genres

119

7 Titus Andronicus and the Rhetoric of Lamentation

121

Adrian Streete

8 The Acts of Pericles: Shakespeare’s Biblical Romance

140

Hannibal Hamlin

9 Finding Pygmalion in the Bible: Classical and Biblical Allusion in The Winter’s Tale

156

Richard Strier

iv enactment: hermeneutics and the social

169

10 Shylock in the Lion’s Den: Enacting Exegesis in The Merchant of Venice

171

Shaina Trapedo

11 Maimed Rites and Whirling Words in Hamlet

188

Jesse M. Lander

12 Political Theology from the Pulpit and the Stage: Sir Thomas More, Richard II, and Henry V

204

Thomas Fulton

Afterword: Shakespeare’s Biblical Virtues

222

Julia Reinhard Lupton

Notes Index

230 285

Illustrations

2.1 Title page, The newe Testamente (London: Richard Jugge, 1553) page 40 2.2 Title page, The New Testament (London: Christopher Barker, 1589) 41 12.1 Detail of Henry VIII with sword and Bible from Hans Holbein’s title page of the Coverdale Bible ([Antwerp], 1535). 212

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Notes on Contributors

Tom Bishop is Professor of English at the University of Auckland. He is the author of Shakespeare and the Theatre of Wonder (1996), translator of Ovid’s Amores (2003), a general editor of The Shakespearean International Yearbook, and the editor of Pericles, Prince of Tyre for the Internet Shakespeare Editions. His writing on masque, early modern dramatic theory, and Shakespeare has appeared in Shakespeare Studies, the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, Religion and Literature, and the collections The Politics of the Stuart Court Masque (1998), Shakespeare and Religious Change (2009), and Medieval Shakespeare: Pasts and Presents (2013), and other fora. Thomas Fulton is Associate Professor of English at Rutgers University. His work on a variety of medieval and early modern writers, including Erasmus, Donne, Shakespeare, and Milton, has appeared in numerous edited collections and journals. He is the author of Historical Milton: Manuscript, Print, and Political Culture in Revolutionary England (2010), coeditor with Ann Baynes Coiro of Rethinking Historicism from Shakespeare to Milton (Cambridge, 2012), and editor of The Bible and English Readers, a special issue of The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies (2017). He is at work on a book on the relationship between biblical hermeneutics and political literature from Erasmus to Milton. Bruce Gordon is the Titus Street Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Yale, where he teaches at the Divinity School and in the History Department. His research and teaching focus on European religious cultures of the late-medieval and early modern periods, with a particular interest in the Reformation and its reception. He is the author of John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion (2016), Calvin (2009), and the Swiss Reformation (2002), a 2003 Choice Magazine “Outstanding Publication.” In addition, he has edited books and written widely on x

Notes on Contributors

xi

early modern history, biblical culture, Reformation devotion and spirituality, and the place of the dead in premodern culture. He was principal investigator for a grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council in the United Kingdom for the project “Protestant Latin Bibles of the Sixteenth Century.” With Mathew McLean he edited Shaping the Bible in the Reformation: Books, Scholars and Their Readers in the Sixteenth Century (2012). Beatrice Groves is the Research Fellow and Lecturer in Renaissance English at Trinity College, Oxford. She has published two monographs on the intersection between early modern literature and religious culture: Texts and Traditions: Religion in Shakespeare, 1592–1604 (2007), and The Destruction of Jerusalem in Early Modern English Literature (Cambridge, 2015). Other essays on Shakespeare, religion, and early modern literature appear in Shakespeare and Early Modern Religion (Cambridge, 2015), Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England (2014), Shakespeare and Renaissance Ethics (Cambridge, 2014), Heralds and Heraldry in Shakespeare’s England (2014), and Milton Studies (2012). Her essay “Jerusalem in Early Modern Travel Writing” won the 2013 Sixteenth Century Society’s Literature Prize. Hannibal Hamlin is Professor of English at the Ohio State University. He is author of Psalm Culture and Early Modern English (Cambridge, 2004) and The Bible in Shakespeare (2013). Additionally, he coedited, with Margaret P. Hannay, Michael G. Brennan, and Noel J. Kinnamon, The Sidney Psalter: Psalms of Philip and Mary Sidney (2009), and with Norman W. Jones, The King James Bible after 400 Years: Literary, Linguistic and Cultural Influences (Cambridge, 2010). He was editor of the journal Reformation from 2009 to 2015. He is currently editing The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Religion and The Bloomsbury Cultural History of the Bible. Jesse M. Lander is Associate Professor at the University of Notre Dame. He is the author of Inventing Polemic: Religion, Print, and Literary Culture in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2006), and editor of Macbeth (2007). Other essays appear in New Ways of Looking at Old Texts IV: Papers of the Renaissance English Text Society (2008) and Cultural Reformations: Medieval and Renaissance in Literary History (Oxford, 2010). He prepared the text of 1 Henry IV for the third edition of the Norton Shakespeare. He is writing a book provisionally entitled Special Affects: Staging the Supernatural

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Notes on Contributors in Shakespeare’s England, and researching a second book-length project on the history of Shakespeare quotation.

Julia Reinhard Lupton is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine. She has written numerous books on Shakespeare and political theology, including: Afterlives of the Saints: Hagiography, Typology and Renaissance Literature (1996), Citizen-Saints: Shakespeare and Political Theology (2005), Thinking with Shakespeare: Essays on Politics and Life (2011), and Shakespeare Dwelling: Designs for the Theater of Life (2018). She is also coauthor with Kenneth Reinhard of After Oedipus: Shakespeare in Psychoanalysis (1992), and coeditor with Graham Hammill of Political Theology and Early Modernity (2011). Other projects include editing the Arden Critical Guide to Romeo and Juliet and coediting with David Goldstein a volume on Shakespeare and hospitality. Kristen Poole is the Blue and Gold Distinguished Professor of English Renaissance Literature at the University of Delaware. She is the author of Radical Religion from Shakespeare to Milton: Figures of Nonconformity in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2000) and Supernatural Environments in Shakespeare’s England: Spaces of Demonism, Divinity, and Drama (Cambridge, 2011). She is coeditor, with Lauren Shohet, of Gathering Force: Early Modern British Literature in Transition, 1557–1623, Volume 1 (Cambridge, 2018) and is currently co-editing a collection on periodization with Owen Williams. She edited Romeo and Juliet for the Luminary Digital Media/Folger Library Shakespeare iPad app, and has published extensively on early modern literature, religion, and the history of science in numerous academic journals and essay collections. Aaron T. Pratt is Carl and Lily Pforzheimer Curator of Early Books and Manuscripts at the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas. His research has appeared in The Library, Shakespeare Studies, The Journal of Visual Culture, and two collections: The Oxford Handbook of Holinshed’s Chronicles (2013) and The King James Bible After Four Hundred Years: Literary, Linguistic, and Cultural Influences (Cambridge, 2011). He is also working to launch a new online resource, BEME: Bibles of Early Modern England, and is writing a monograph that re-evaluates the cultural status of printed playbooks and develops a new history of English drama as a literary form.

Notes on Contributors

xiii

Adrian Streete is Senior Lecturer in English Literature, 1500–1780, at the University of Glasgow. He is author of Protestantism and Drama in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2009), editor of Early Modern Drama and the Bible: Contexts and Readings, 1570–1625 (2012), and coeditor of Filming and Performing Renaissance History (2011) and The Edinburgh Companion to Shakespeare and the Arts (2011). He has published widely in essay collections such as Shakespeare and Early Modern Religion (Cambridge, 2015), and in journals such as Renaissance Studies, The Seventeenth Century, Literature and History, and Textual Practice. His most recent book, Apocalypse and Anti-Catholicism in SeventeenthCentury English Drama (Cambridge, 2017) is the result of a Leverhulme Research Fellowship. Richard Strier, the Frank L. Sulzberger Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus in the English Department, the Divinity School, and the College of the University of Chicago, is the author of Love Known: Theology and Experience in George Herbert’s Poetry (1983), Resistant Structures: Particularity, Radicalism, and Renaissance Texts (1996), and The Unrepentant Renaissance from Petrarch to Shakespeare to Milton (2011), which won the Warren-Brooks Prize for Literary Criticism. He has coedited a number of interdisciplinary collections (most recently, on Shakespeare and Law) and published essays on Shakespeare, Donne, Luther, Montaigne, and Milton, and on twentieth-century poetry and critical theory. Shaina Trapedo, lecturer in English Literature at Touro College and Director of Languages and Humanities at Manhattan High School, specializes in Renaissance literature with specific interests in performance studies, biblical studies, and cultural rhetoric. Her current book project, From Scripture to Script: David, Daniel, Esther and the Performance of Early Modern Identity, considers the affordances and risks of hermeneutic engagements on the Renaissance stage. In her teaching and scholarship, she continues to explore the connections between literacy, cultural identity, and social engagement. Jay Zysk is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts–Dartmouth. He works on late-medieval and early modern drama, Reformation theology, and the history of the body. He is the author of Shadow and Substance: Eucharistic Controversy and English Drama across the Reformation Divide (2017). His other publications include “Relics and Unreliable Bodies in The Changeling” (English

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Notes on Contributors

Literary Renaissance, 2015); “Melting Flesh, Living Words” (postmedieval, 2013), and “The Last Temptation of Faustus: Contested Rites and Eucharistic Representation in Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus” (Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 2013). He was awarded a short-term research fellowship from the Folger Shakespeare Library in 2014.

Acknowledgments

We would like to express, first and foremost, our profound gratitude to Matthew Rinkevich for his editorial assistance with this volume. Matt proofread, formatted, and fact-checked the manuscript, all with infallible good cheer and efficiency. We are grateful to the Office of the Provost at the University of Delaware for providing financial support for this editorial assistance. Kristen would also like to thank Dr. Erik Heen of the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia for a stimulating seminar on Reformation hermeneutics that developed her interest in the topic, and Thomas Fulton for launching an ongoing conversation about Shakespeare and biblical interpretation. Thomas would like to thank Kristen Poole for her extraordinary intellectual generosity and editorial acumen. He is also immensely grateful for the kind support of the Folger Shakespeare Library, where much of the work was conducted in 2014–15. The year’s leave at the Folger was made possible by a fellowship from the NEH. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this volume do not necessarily reflect those of the National Endowment for the Humanities. The project could not have been completed without additional financial support from Rutgers University. This project has benefited from opportunities for intellectual exchange at numerous conferences. Several of the volume’s contributors presented papers at sessions organized by Thomas Fulton, including “Reading Shakespeare and the Bible” at the Shakespeare Association of America in Boston in 2012, and panels at the Renaissance Society of America in San Diego in 2013 and Berlin in 2015. We are extremely grateful to all of the audiences and colleagues who have engaged with, criticized, and enlivened our work. The careful readings of two anonymous readers for Cambridge University Press helped to shape the project at critical junctures. Our indexer, J. Naomi Linzer, gave the book careful attention. Sarah Lambert graciously led the manuscript through the production process. We are especially grateful for the encouragement, expertise, and steady guidance of our editors at the Press, Sarah Stanton and Emily Hockley. xv

A Note on the Text

Early modern printing frequently had customs that look strange to modern eyes, using i where we would use j, and u where we would use v, for instance. Scholars hold different opinions on the desirability of retaining original orthography or modernizing the spelling, and we consider these opinions to be matters of philosophical difference, not simply matters of style. Throughout these chapters, then, some authors have chosen to modernize early modern texts, and some have preferred to retain original spelling. In a few particular instances where the original orthography might be an impediment to comprehension, i’s have been silently emended to j’s, and u’s to v’s. The letters m and n were often omitted in early modern printing, signaled by a tittle over the words; these m’s and n’s have been supplied here with italics, as in command.

xvi

introduction

Popular Hermeneutics in Shakespeare’s London Thomas Fulton and Kristen Poole

“Popular hermeneutics” might strike many readers as a twofold oxymoron. Hermeneutics, which encompasses both the theory and methodology of interpreting sacred Scripture, has long been the purview of an intellectual elite, requiring the knowledge of biblical languages, linguistic structures, the vast body of inherited exegetical scholarship, and, of course, an intricate familiarity with the Bible itself. This exclusive set of skills and erudite knowledge is hardly what we associate with the general populace today, let alone with early modern commoners who had a lower rate of literacy and arguably more restricted access to education. And if biblical hermeneutics are not perceived as “popular” in the sense of being “common,” they are also hardly considered “popular” in the sense of being widely liked. Hermeneutics can have the reputation of being arcane, moldy, ridiculously abstract, and convoluted. Yet in Shakespeare’s London, there was a widespread cultural fascination with the Bible and biblical interpretation. As many scholars have recently discussed, the Bible was an utterly central text in early modern England, not only informing spiritual practice and personal life, but structuring its politics and society as well. Sixteenth-century Protestantism, following Martin Luther’s call for sola scriptura, placed a premium on biblical knowledge, and therefore the Bible was read in a myriad of textual forms – massive, ornate Bibles housed in churches; smaller, affordable divisions of the Bible (such as the Old or New Testament) that could be carried in pockets; psalters (i.e., the book of Psalms in poetic meter) that could be sung with a congregation or at home. Counter-Reformation Catholic readers also read the new English Bibles, and were furnished with translations specifically for Catholics – the New Testament in 1582, and the complete Bible in 1609–10.1 In addition to public and private readings of the Bible, people flocked to hear sermons, which were essentially lengthy exegetical lectures on a small passage of Scripture. Biblical scenes were painted on expensive household goods and 1

2

thomas fulton and kristen poole

printed on cheap broadsides that could be hung for domestic decoration. In a helpful analogy, Hannibal Hamlin invites us to imagine a culture in which there was one television show that everyone was legally compelled to watch, that was playing on television all of the time, and that had been for generations – this is how familiar the biblical stories would have been to Shakespeare’s audience.2 The Bible was culturally ubiquitous; it was a text that people spoke through and about. In recent years, the topic of “Shakespeare and religion” has flourished, encompassing a vigorous range of topics (political power, sacrament, the supernatural, gender, social identities, theatrical representation, etc.).3 Yet, as Hamlin notes, “What has been described as the ‘turn to religion’ in the study of early modern English literature has perhaps generated some increased interest in the Bible and Shakespeare, yet less than one might expect.”4 Hamlin’s own book The Bible in Shakespeare – along with other recent titles such as Travis Cook and Alan Galey’s collection Shakespeare, the Bible, and the Form of the Book: Contested Scripture (2014), Beatrice Groves’s Texts and Traditions: Religion in Shakespeare 1592–1604 (2007), Adrian Streete’s collection Early Modern Drama and the Bible: Contexts and Readings 1570–1625 (2012), and Steven Marx’s earlier Shakespeare and the Bible (2000)5 – have made this statement less true than it once was. While these studies all offer important insights into Shakespeare’s use of Scripture, a key concern continues to be neglected: how Shakespearean plays engage with the Reformation imperative to not just read the Bible, but to interpret it. The Protestant Reformation was, at its heart, a debate over the nature of language and the nature of reading. Given that scriptural and hermeneutic literacy derived from both the private experience of reading and the aural experience of sermons, audience members of Shakespeare’s plays would have been knowledgeable about biblical interpretation to a degree that has largely been unacknowledged by scholars, even though this has tremendous ramifications for how audiences would have processed textual features ranging from biblical allusion to puns. Shakespeare himself, deeply attentive to words and language, lived in the midst of this popularization of hermeneutics, and his plays reflect biblical fluency and engagement with contemporary exegetical debates. The question of how to interpret the Bible was charged with profound social, political, and personal implications. The Reformation therefore sponsored a cultural imperative for people to become not only biblically literate, but also aware of interpretive practices and principles. And indeed, hermeneutic instruction was popularized, leading to a consumer demand for interpretive education that fueled the dramatic rise of the publishing

Introduction

3

industry in the latter half of the sixteenth century. The Bible and exegetical texts were available in the vernacular as never before (or since). The material form of Bibles, with their extensive textual glosses and other paratextual aids, taught readers how to approach Scripture on their own. Sermons – both spoken and printed – brought Reformation hermeneutics to a listening and reading public.6 Biblical commentaries, which appeared in a variety of forms (erudite or simplified, expensive or cheap), promoted interpretive study among a range of populations. Building on the scholarship of Richmond Noble and others, Naseeb Shaheen produced a reference volume in 1999 that attempted to catalog all of the biblical references in Shakespeare’s plays. Of course, many of Shakespeare’s biblical references remain unrecorded, and some of the writers in this volume (such as Richard Strier, Chapter 9) have pointed to hitherto unrecognized allusions. And often, as Hannibal Hamlin shows in his chapter on Acts (Chapter 8) and Adrian Streete in his chapter on Lamentations (Chapter 7), the connection to the Bible can be far more structural and generic than the precise linguistic quality of allusion. Shaheen’s study shows evidence that Shakespeare drew from at least two dominant Elizabethan Bibles – the Geneva Bible, first created by Protestant exiles during the reign of Mary I and embellished in the Elizabethan context, and the Bishops’ Bible, created by Archbishop Parker and others to be the official pulpit Bible – though, as Aaron Pratt shows in Chapter 2, our knowledge of this bibliographic history remains incomplete, and Shakespeare may have drawn from other popular Bibles. For psalm allusions and other parts of the Bible that had become part of the English liturgy, Shakespeare’s references also derive from the language of the Prayer Book Psalter and the Book of Common Prayer.7 This evidence suggests the probability that some of the references that derive from the Bishops’ Bible and other church sources were in fact heard in church, that they derive not from Shakespeare’s reading per se, but from the experience of hearing these texts read and interpreted in sermons and liturgical settings. An explosion in printed Bibles and a rise in literacy rates contributed to the cultural ubiquity of biblical texts. By the late sixteenth century, Scripture had become a fixed part of the English educational curriculum; indeed, the Bible and biblical primers were often among the first things read by boys and girls. More advanced students, as Bruce Gordon reminds us in Chapter 1, would have studied from the heavily glossed Protestant Latin Bibles produced on the continent by Beza, Junius, and Tremellius. For the general reader and sermon-goer, sermons on biblical texts were full

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of entertainment, as in this action-packed description of Jonah’s voyage to Ninevah (Jonah 1:5), which reads a bit like the opening to Shakespeare’s Tempest: “The windes rage, the sea roareth, the ship tottereth and groaneth, the marriners feare, and pray, and cry, every soule in the ship, so many persons upon so many Gods, . . . they runne to and fro, they ransacke all the corners of the ship, unbowell her inmost celles, throwe out commodities, rende and rape downe tackles, sailes, all implementes.”8 Shakespeare’s audience would have had a relationship to the biblical text that depended heavily on the aural experience of having the Bible read and interpreted in sermons. Though largely focused on “reading” as an interpretive mode, scholars in this volume are also attentive to the ways that scriptural representations on the stage derive from both the written page and the pulpit; indeed, the pulpit and the stage are both places where the biblical text is, in a sense, performed as well as interpreted. Printed sermons, like printed plays, are a kind of record of what happened, often at a particular place and time: “as it was preached” and “as it was acted” frequently inform the paratextual presentation of these performed events. Some authoritative sermons, such as those preached before the monarch, or those printed in Homilies sanctioned by the church, provide a vital comparative archive for dramatic representations of particular biblical passages. And as Thomas Fulton discusses in Chapter 12, Shakespeare’s own plays (which were similarly performed before the monarch) themselves staged bishops and other sermonizers interpreting the biblical text. The Bible, then, was not just the most read, but also the most methodically scrutinized text in early modern England. First printed illegally in English by William Tyndale in 1525, but soon given royal sanction, Scripture was disseminated with prescribed methods of reading – in the apparatus of the Bible itself or in manuals and church teachings. In spite of the frequently reiterated Protestant notion of “sola scriptura,” scriptural texts were seldom left to speak for themselves. The Geneva Bible grew through its many printings and revisions to have an extensive system of notes. As Protestantism became entrenched under Elizabeth, the Church of England sought to establish particular reading methods and practices. These could be challenged, however, by the various modes of biblical interpretation put into play through the heated polemics enabled by the printing press and a robust market for religious reading material, by the unlicensed and often itinerant preachers, or simply by the creative lay reader with Bible in hand. Biblical hermeneutics, in sum, were popularized in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England, and modes of interpretation had direct

Introduction

5

personal and cultural ramifications. Whether the biblical text was to be read literally or figuratively (or through a complex relation of the two) was a pressing cultural concern which could be realized in social experiments like the community at Little Gidding where devotees cut up and organized the Bible chronologically, reading it as a historical document. Typology, too, became a lived concern, and readers were trained to view their lives through biblical precedents – Protestant exiles returning after Mary saw Elizabeth as “our Zerubbabell,”9 the descendant of David who would build the second temple after the Babylonian captivity; earlier, many had hailed her half-brother Edward VI as a new Josiah.10 And those who would soon emigrate to the “New World” understood their journey in explicitly biblical terms: John Winthrop preached his sermon on the “city upon a hill,” from Matthew 5:14, as he sailed for Massachusetts Bay Colony.11 The Reformation popularized ideas about how to read the Bible, and this knowledge was translated into lived experience. Shakespeare, like his contemporaries, was familiar with Reformation hermeneutic issues and with various trends in interpretation, and presumed an audience that would be also. And just as Elizabethans could see their own lives through exegetical principles, so too Shakespeare’s characters make sense of their worlds through modes of biblical interpretation. Hamlet asserts to Horatio that there is a “divinity that shapes our ends” (5.2.10) and later supports this, as Jesse Lander discusses (Chapter 11), with a potentially Calvinist reading of Matthew 10:29, “there is a special providence in the fall of a sparrow” (5.2.220). In Richard II, Richard tries to come to terms with his contradictory situation through the hermeneutic idea of collocation and repugnancy, “set[ting] the word itself / Against the word,” as Tom Bishop argues in Chapter 6. In Measure for Measure, the “precise” Angelo reads literally, as Jay Zysk argues in Chapter 3 of this volume, as does the more comic Puritan figure of Malvolio, the cheerless moral policeman and the literalist who wrenches the text to his own ends.12 In ways that are both oblique and direct, questions of how to read a text pervade Shakespeare’s plays.

Buzzing Piddlers and the Teaching of Exegesis: Sermons from the Pulpit and in Print Shakespeare’s plays are often self-reflexive about their own demands for interpretation, but they repeatedly presume a set of interpretive precepts that emerge from Reformation hermeneutics and ways of reading the Bible in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England. Perhaps the best

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way to give an overview of the most basic hermeneutic concepts that would have been familiar to many in Shakespeare’s original audience – while also showing how readers would have received this information – is to enter the colorful, dynamic, and lively culture of early modern hermeneutics through some exemplary sermons. The enthusiasm for early modern sermons can still be surprising – sermons at St. Paul’s, for instance, could draw a crowd of up to 6,000 people. To put this in context, the Globe Theatre held approximately 3,000.13 The stage competed with the pulpit for crowds and entertainment, and sermons were also an extremely popular commodity in the burgeoning marketplace of print, often becoming bestsellers. In a vivid contemporary account of sermon-gadding, Laurence Barker describes the arrival of a new, young preacher: “Oh for Gods sake where teacheth hee [they say], to him they will runne for haste without their dinners, sit waiting by his church till the doore be open, if the place bee full, clime vp at the windows, pull down the glass to heare him, and fill the Church-yard full.”14 But Barker is far from delighted by these crowds that fill the churchyard, writing with cranky disdain of the type of preachers he deems “buzzing piddlers.”15 He laments that “there is not so much respect to bee had of old weather-beaten souldiours, as of new-trayned men,” and “the same do many amongst us holde concerning Preachers.”16 Barker has a keen, and even poignant, sense of the old generation of clergy being pushed aside by the popularity of the young: For their owne poore shepheard it makes no matter for him, though he haue from God the charge of all their soules: God helpe him poore man, he is an over-worne divine: his learning is now out-dated: but if they should goe to Church, they would wish to heare a yong eloquent scholler, newe come from the Universitie, one that wil give them the flower and creame of his flowing witte, and that can deliver his mind in such fine polished tearmes, as in admiration will make them hold up their hands and blesse them.17

And it is not just the new university men who get under Barker’s skin. Even worse might be the unordained, “hotter sort” of preachers, who attract auditors away from more learned elders. His complaint is worth quoting at length, since it reveals the degree to which different exegetical approaches were a matter of popular concern: Tell them where they may heare an Honourable Bishop preach, a reverend Prelate, or an auncient grave divine, tush, they know what these are, temporizing formalists, a sort of silken Doctours, such as when a man heares their text hee may gesse himselfe what will be al

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their Sermon: but if you can tell them of a trimme yong man, that will not quote the Fathers (and good reason, for his horse never eate a bottle of hay in eyther of the Universities): that neuer yet tooke orders, but had his calling approoved by the plaine lay-elders (for he was too irregular to be ordred by a Bishop): that will not confounde the congregation with latine sentences (for he is not guiltie of the Romane language): that will not sticke to revile them that are in authoritie, that his sectaries may crie he is persecuted, when hee is justly silenced.18

It is not just the person of the “yong eloquent scholler” or the uneducated “trimme yong man” that irks Barker: it is the content of his sermons, full of polished rhetoric on the one hand and ignorant of patristic learning on the other. But of course, as much as Barker complains about sermon readers and auditors (which he conflates in calling his printed sermon an “Auditorie”19), his own book only exists because of the period’s widespread vogue for sermons.20 There are a number of reasons why sermons were popular. In a time of heightened religiosity, many people were avidly concerned about spiritual matters. At a moment when the printing press was a relatively recent technology, the availability of biblical text was a source of fascination. At a juncture when Calvinism and its emphasis on preaching the Word were ascendant, it was, as one contemporary put it, “requisite for all true Christians to be instructed in [the Bible].”21 And the confluence of new purpose-built professional playhouses and public sermons, in a time of rapid population growth, led to homologous experiences of crowds gathering for dramatic or oratory performances.22 These phenomena – and how they impacted Shakespeare’s theater – have been studied extensively. But there is another element at play here that has received much less attention: that “men [and women] took bookes in hand to increase their learning.”23 Sermons, in part, were teaching people not just the content of the Bible, but how to read and analyze the text. Motivated by anti-Catholic politics and biblical imperatives, numerous authors sought to bring the Bible to the masses: If this booke [the Bible] be so darke and so mysticall, that it cannot be understood: if the interpretation of it be uncertaine: or if the common people cannot be taught to understand it, & therefore are not to meddle with it, how should the holy Ghost say, Blessed is he that readeth, and they that heare the words of this prophecy, and keepe the things which are written therein? [Revelation 1:3] Let any man judge that hath common sense, shall a man ever become blessed by reading or hearing those things which he cannot understand, or which he is not to meddle withal?24

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Sermons, from both the pulpit and the page, were thus educational affairs – the rabble in Barker’s account ask, significantly, “where teacheth hee?” when they learn of a great preacher, and they are eager for a sermon “that they never heard before, and everye day a new one.”25 Unlike the pietist sermons of later centuries, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century sermons frequently sought to educate their audience on specific hermeneutic principles and techniques of exegesis. Not just biblical content, then, but biblical reading protocols were taught in sermons. Readers were instructed on the necessity of comparing different passages of the Bible, or collocation, associated with the practice of “harmonizing” (discussed in Chapter 6). Thus we find statements such as “And because the safest and most sound interpretation of the Scriptures, is by other like places of the Scriptures, wee reade this like kinde of saying in the first of John, concerning Christ,”26 and “His exposition is plaine not onely by testimonies of interpreters, but by conference & witnesse of scriptures themselves,”27 and “Plaine againe is the scripture for the firmenesse and stabilitie of this decree of God, as by many places might be showed.”28 In addition, audiences were taught how to read for typology, the idea that one biblical figure or event foreshadows another. This concept appears in short comments, such as the assertion that Jonah is “a figure & type of the conversion of other Gentiles,”29 and in longer explanations such as this one: May it please you therefore to understand, that in the new Testament, the texts & prophesies of the old Testament, are alleaged somtimes properly & according the litteral sense, [and] . . . Sometime not properly & litterally, but to expresse some truth which was signified or shadowed by them: as in the 1. to the Heb. that of the 2. Sam. 7. I wil be his father & he shal be my Son; which being properly spoken of Salomon, is applied by the Apostle to our Saviour Christ, whose life & figure Salomon was: as also in the 19. of S. Johns Gospell that of the 12. of Exodus, Os non comminuetis ex eo, Not a bone of him shal be broken: which being spoken litterally of the lambe, the Evangelist applies to our Saviour, who was figured by the paschal lambe.30

The direct second person address – “May it please you therefore to understand” – reinforces the pedagogical nature of these sermons, which enthusiastically inculcated as they explicated. Here the preacher recognizes that his audience will understand the imperative of literal reading, but suggests that in some cases a passage needs to be read “not properly” (or not literally), but in a “figured” or “shadowed” sense. The more modern, technical terms “type” and “typology” describing this interpretive

Introduction

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procedure were much rarer; the notes to the Geneva Bible, for example, always use the word “figure,” as in its description of David in the Argument to 1 Samuel as “the true figure of the Messiah, placed in his steade, whose pacience, modestie, constancie, persecution by open enemies, fained friends, and dissembling flatterers are left to the Church and to every member of the same, as a patterne and example to beholde their state and vocacion.”31 As is the case here, figuration is shown throughout the Geneva Bible to be far more capacious than strict typology: the story of David supplies a “figure” of Christ, but also “a paterne and example” for the early modern “state,” a form of applied historical typology that Beatrice Groves takes up in Chapter 5 on readings of London as the new Jerusalem. Reading for typological “figures” spills into a third hermeneutic: reading for the literal and figurative senses of Scripture (discussed in this volume by Jay Zysk in Chapter 3 and Kristen Poole in Chapter 4). While reformers had varied and deep concerns about the interpretive protocols of the medieval quadriga, whereby biblical passages were presumed to have a fourfold significance (the literal/historical, allegorical/moral, tropological, and anagogical), the idea that Scripture carried multiple senses persisted in Protestant reading. In a small octavo sermon printed on cheap paper – that is, in a text that was clearly marketed for the popular reader – we find a lengthy explication of the multiple senses of Scripture, where “in the reading of the Old Testament wee must not be ignorant that it receyueth two interpretations, the one hystoricall, the other mysticall.”32 The sermon’s author, John Dove, interprets at length Jesus’s comment to Judas that “he that eateth bread with me hath lifted vp his heele against me.”33 Dove takes the reader through the context of the Psalm that Jesus is here quoting, considering how “Christ in the new Testament dooth mystically expounde it of himselfe,” and “Likewise Peter interpreteth this saying of David,” which takes us back into the ancient Jews and the Roman Empire. Dove concludes, “these blessings & cursings, loue & hatred, which in the old testament are historicall, are in the new testament mystical.”34 Here the biblical text is shown to have a literal, historical meaning as well as a figurative, allegorical one, and, strikingly, we see both Jesus and Peter practicing this kind of interpretation as model readers. These three exegetical practices – collocation or harmonization, typological interpretation, and reading for different senses – are the specific major aspects of hermeneutics that recur in the period’s sermon literature. We should note, though, the even wider education in complex theories of signs and semiotics that early modern readers received. Readers are taught to “discerne betwixt signes which signifie onely, and signes which

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also doe represent, confirme and seale up (or as a man may say) give with their signification”; or, otherwise put, there are “signes significative, [that] shew no gift. But in the other signes, which some call exhibitive, is there not onely a signification of the thing, but also a declaration of a gift.”35 This passage appears in a small octavo sermon, suitable for carrying in one’s pocket. It is indicative of a historical moment when theorizing about the distinction between signs significative and signs exhibitive was on offer for the common reader, and when a massive consumer market for such sermons keep them coming off the printing press in droves. It is in this context that we consider the particular terms of Barker’s description of the hoi polloi chasing after flashy new preachers – the people reject the parish priest because “his learning is now out-dated,” and divines are “temporizing formalists . . . such as when a man heares their text hee may gesse himselfe what will be al their Sermon.” This is an educated mob indeed. In another text, we catch a glimpse of the type of critical conversations that might have taken place after hearing a sermon. In Times Lamentation: or an exposition on the Prophet Joel, in sundry Sermons or Meditations (1599) (one copy in the British Library with the delightfully ironic seventeenth-century inscription, “My Aunt Muddle lent me this booke”), Edward Topsell observes, Sometimes the preachers . . . want learning to feede the curious minds of vaine religion bablers; . . . I like not this sermon, saith one bicause he wanted words: it was a silly piece of worke saith another, bicause it was not bombasted with the sayings of Fathers, and he seldome or never confuted the papists: and other saith that the preacher was but a poore beggarly fellowe, and therefore it is no matter what hee says, none of the great men would haue said so much.36

“Vaine religion bablers” they might be – and, as Topsell would have it, long-haired guys who also spend their time at whorehouses37 – but this is an audience with “curious minds.” Topsell might “complaine of the neglect of preaching and prophesying as Jeremie did of Jerusalem Lament,” and cry “Oh miserable and lamentable daies wherein men come to the congregation like buyers to a faire, and they all crie it is naught it is naught,” but his very complaints indicate the degree to which the congregation was listening – avidly and critically – to sermons.38 Certainly there were those who, in Henry Smith’s words, merely “frequent[ed] sermons for fashion to serve the time,”39 but a fair number of people seemed to be paying a fair amount of attention to biblical hermeneutics. This may even be an understatement – as Peter Stallybrass and others have

Introduction

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shown, sermon-goers brought their Bibles to sermons to mark and comment on passages, and the biblical paratext encouraged this.40 These were active listeners, learners, and critics. Many of these listeners and readers were also in the audience for Shakespeare’s plays. This volume sets out to explore how this sixteenthand seventeenth-century hermeneutic culture intersects with the Shakespearean theater. While scholars have addressed the similarities of early modern preaching and performance,41 to date there has been little consideration of how the popular vogue for biblical hermeneutics – that is, a popular interest not only in the Bible as a set of stories, but as a text with particular structures and interpretive protocols – inflected both the production and the reception of Shakespearean drama.

About This Volume The Bible on the Shakespearean Stage seeks to integrate the study of Shakespeare’s plays with the vital history of practices of biblical interpretation that arose from the English Reformation. Such hermeneutics were, at one level, disseminated to the reading and listening public, and therefore available to Shakespeare and his audience. A working assumption in what follows is that questions of biblical interpretation – often contested and polemically driven, not just between Catholics and Protestants but avidly debated even amongst coreligionists – were lively and familiar. The chapters in this volume naturally engage with biblical allusion and quotation; these are, de facto, the bedrock of any study of Shakespeare and the Bible. But the chapters move beyond noting allusions, or even beyond considering the textual power of literary allusions, to consider the implications of actual biblical hermeneutics, the strategies and protocols of scriptural interpretation. Recognizing the effect of such interpretive theories and practices opens a rich array of social, theological, and textual implications. The book is divided into four parts. The first part, “Europe, England: Contextualizing Shakespeare’s Bible,” historically situates the discussion of biblical interpretation in different ways. Bruce Gordon (Chapter 1) brings us out of the myopic vision that can tend to isolate discussions of the Bible in England from the vast linguistic scholarship and textual developments happening on the continent – international developments that shaped the primary English Bibles of the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Geneva and Bishops’ Bibles. Aaron Pratt (Chapter 2) then takes us to England, demonstrating how much publishers and printers – the business

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of marketing books – dictated the sale of the sacred word to the public. Of course, biblical translation and production is deeply influenced by the creators of Bibles – whether they are appointed bishops, outlaws such as Tyndale, or Calvinists like the Marian exiles in Geneva – but a great deal of biblical production, especially the paratextual packaging of Scripture, was the province of the printer and publisher. As Pratt shows, the most popular New Testament in Shakespeare’s England seems to have been an odd conglomerate of many religious views, and one that reminds us that religious affiliation often had very little to do with the consumption of particular Bibles. The next part, “Stagings: Reformation Reading Practices in the Theater,” considers how Shakespeare’s drama participated in – and was shaped by – foundational Reformation practices of scriptural reading. Taken together, these chapters explore the fundamentals of Christian biblical exegesis discussed earlier – collocation, typology, and the relationship of the literal and the figurative/allegorical. Jay Zysk’s reading of the significance of John 6 in Measure for Measure (Chapter 3) demonstrates how Shakespeare deploys the contentious debate about the relationship between the literal and the figurative in sacramental and biblical hermeneutics to dramatize interpretive crises centered on the application of secular laws. Kristen Poole’s chapter on Hamlet (Chapter 4) illustrates how the play’s interest in punning, and amphibology more generally, responds to the complex Protestant semiotics of the notion of a plain, literal sense that nonetheless paradoxically absorbs a multiplicity of figurative meanings; Hamlet’s “pregnant” paronomastic replies not only play with a crammed literalism, but, in a moment when individuals are encouraged to imagine themselves as text, contribute to a fraught notion of the person as a sign. Beatrice Groves (Chapter 5) explores the implications of Henry IV dying in the “Jerusalem Chamber” in 2 Henry IV, demonstrating how the typological connection between the faithful and Israel promoted within Protestant biblical exegesis led Londoners to understand their city as a new Jerusalem; this identification positions Henry’s death not as the failure of a missed pilgrimage, but as the aspirational fulfillment of a lived typology. Tom Bishop (Chapter 6) contemplates the portrayal of inhabiting a scripturally inflected world in Richard II, tracing the complications and possibilities that arise when collocation – the specific textual practice of scriptural commentary and exegesis via the juxtaposition of gospel texts – leads not to harmony, but to a verbal repugnancy that results in what Bishop calls “the uniquely folded registers of scriptural reading and understanding” that model theatrical performance itself.

Introduction

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Having established some of the ways in which the plays engage with the specifics of hermeneutical principles, the volume then opens out to consider more broadly how modes of biblical interpretation become interwoven with the interpretive protocols of other early modern genres. Biblical hermeneutics have traditionally been discussed in isolation from other early modern textual modes – rhetoric, romance, classical texts – but, as our authors demonstrate, there was a frequent interpenetration of biblical text with other genres, and a concomitant intermingling of interpretive protocols. Part III, “Interplay: Biblical Forms and Other Genres,” thus explores how these interpolations invited expanded and sometimes hybrid practices of interpretation. Adrian Streete (Chapter 7) examines the generative interplay between the Roman rhetoric of oratory and the biblical rhetoric of lament in Titus Andronicus, arguing that far from trying to reconcile these traditions, Shakespeare exploits the competing ethical and rhetorical provocations for the material of dramatic conflict. Hannibal Hamlin (Chapter 8) approaches Pericles as a dramatic work in which the generic features of romance – “stormy seas, shipwreck, and inexplicable turns of fortune” – appear alongside pervasive allusions to the biblical Jonah story. Recognizing these textual features, he offers the play as a romance of conversion. Finally, Richard Strier (Chapter 9) traces classical and biblical allusions in The Winter’s Tale. He examines moments of intertextuality between Shakespeare’s drama, the Pygmalion narrative in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and biblical texts, especially First and Second Kings and the book of Habakkuk. Doing so, he insists upon the dramatic integrity of The Winter’s Tale’s final scene, offering its iconophilic/iconoclastic resonances as a dramatic testament to the power of living, breathing love – an essential feature of human relationships, including those with the divine. In the final part, “Enactment: Hermeneutics and the Social,” contributors consider the personal and political impact of particular types of exegetical reading. Shaina Trapedo (Chapter 10) takes on the question of the intensely repeated invocations of the persecuted interpreter Daniel in the trial scene of The Merchant of Venice. These references are still more complicated by the fact that Portia takes the name “Balthasar” – a name that had been given to Daniel upon arrival at the court of Nebuchadnezzar in Babylon as a way of erasing his Jewish identity, or, as the Geneva note explains, suggestively transporting Daniel’s story to a Christian context, “that they might altogether forget their religion” (Daniel 1.7 note). Tracing a remarkable interpretive history by Jewish and Reformation scholars, some of whom, like Calvin, characterize the biblical book in generic

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terms like “tragedy,” Trapedo explores the drama of religious identity in Shakespeare’s play. Like Trapedo, Jesse M. Lander (Chapter 11) also examines tensions between conflicting religious sensibilities – that is, Catholic ritual and Protestant biblical devotion – in Shakespeare. Focusing on “maimed rites” and whirling words” in Hamlet, Lander offers Matthew 10:29 as a key for understanding conflicts between rite and writing in the tragedy. He places Hamlet in a contested and ultimately mysterious context of Christian providentialism. Thomas Fulton (Chapter 12) closes the final part by transitioning from the gospels to the Pauline epistles. Focusing on the most predominant biblical passage of its length in all of Shakespeare – and arguably in the period itself – Romans 13: 1–7, on obedience to “the powers that be,” Fulton investigates the ways that Shakespeare’s history plays reflect the interpretation of this passage on the pulpit and in printed theologies. Through examining Shakespeare’s rich structures of allusion and wordplay, the chapters renew and invigorate scholarly conversations of oncefamiliar concepts, such as typology and figurative language. Attuned to the controversies of his time, Shakespeare explores the linguistic positions that emerged from heated debates about biblical hermeneutics and culturally legitimated modes of interpretation. Together, the chapters in this volume position Shakespeare’s plays within these debates, and reveal how a scholarly sensitivity to the playwright’s engagement with post-Reformation hermeneutic cultures not only helps us to better understand the drama, but also the complexities of England’s engagement with the Bible.

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Europe, England: Contextualizing Shakespeare’s Bible

chapter 1

The Bible in Transition in the Age of Shakespeare: A European Perspective Bruce Gordon

The chapters in this volume testify to a growing scholarly appreciation of the depth of Shakespeare’s engagement with the Bible, and an increasing sophistication in recognizing his drama’s complex and sustained interplay with biblical culture. The phenomenon of biblical translation was one of the foremost intellectual pursuits of the sixteenth century.1 In Shakespeare’s England, the astonishingly powerful theological, pastoral, and literary transformation produced by Reformation biblical culture was manifest in the Geneva Bible of 1560, an elegant vernacular translation surrounded by a dense forest of Reformed Protestant doctrinal interpretation.2 And, famously, the King James Bible, the subsequent culmination of an extensive collaborative textual project, was finalized in 1611. To consider these Bibles in a purely English context, though, is to overlook their participation in the much larger, pan-European context that was the reality of humanist intellectual exchange and the European print market, both of which flowed freely across national boundaries.3 Inspired by the scholarship of the Dutch humanist Erasmus and Martin Luther’s principle of sola scriptura, two generations of reformers committed themselves to the Protestant Bible, a protean book unlike any previous version of Scripture. This chapter traces the multifaceted, multilingual history of European biblical scholarship and printing in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Attending to this rich history enables us to position Shakespeare’s engagement with the Bible not just in terms of intertextuality, but as a mode of participating in a vibrant linguistic movement that attracted the efforts of many of the period’s leading intellectuals.

Origins of the Renaissance Bible The Bible in the Reformation underwent a radical reformulation and reinterpretation, in the course of which a new book appeared. These 17

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changes began with the jewel of the Northern Renaissance, Erasmus’s Novum Instrumentum omne, his New Testament with Greek text, revised Latin translation, and extensive annotations, printed by Johann Froben in Basel in 1516.4 The Novum Instrumentum, with the following editions known as the Novum Testamentum, established that the foundation of the Protestant Scriptures lay in the study of ancient languages.5 The 1519 edition was the basis for Luther’s September Testament of 1522, and both in turn were used to create William Tyndale’s translations, starting in 1525. All doctrinal formulations had to be demonstrably rooted in Hebrew and Greek, a striking departure from the medieval church. For his humanist supporters, Erasmus’s New Testament provided inspiration for the pursuit of sacred philology, while his critics fiercely rounded on him for daring to challenge the teaching of the church. The Novum Instrumentum was, in Erasmus’s words, a new Latin version based on Greek and Latin texts.6 Where his translation differed from the Vulgate, the change was explained in detail in the Annotationes. The result was stunning, a fresh version of the New Testament in Latin. The Dutchman’s intention, however, was not to diminish the authority of the Bible that had been preeminent in the West for over a thousand years: Erasmus was adamant that his labors were on behalf of the church in correcting errors that had corrupted Jerome’s inheritance.7 Nevertheless, a storm of controversy arose as established proof texts for theology and law were swept away. At the same time, with the rise of Christian Hebraism north of the Alps in the early decades of the sixteenth century, a select number of churchmen were able to turn to the ancient Semitic languages as the basis for translation and commentary in the hope of finding the original sources.8 Although Erasmus had no Hebrew, many of the first generation of Christian Hebraists, including Konrad Pellikan and Johannes Oecolampadius, emerged from his circle.9 The flower of these early years was a Hebrew/Greek Bible that formed the new foundation for the study of Scripture: Erasmus’s New Testament, together with the Rabbinic Bible printed in Venice by Daniel Bomberg, created a new world of possibilities when set against the corrupted Latin Vulgate of the medieval church. Erasmus’s influence on this revolution has been rightly acknowledged, but the sheer extent of his reach is less appreciated. Following in the footsteps of Lorenzo Valla (1407–57) and Johannes Reuchlin (1455–1522), Erasmus transformed the study of the Bible in Northern Europe through use of manuscripts (admittedly limited) and philology (principally Greek and Latin), applying to the text of Scripture the techniques used in his critical editions of classical and patristic sources.10 For the first half of the

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sixteenth century, Erasmus’s New Testament remained the gold standard.11 His achievements were the scholarly point of departure, and biblical culture in the second half of the sixteenth century continued to wrestle with questions first raised by the Dutch humanist.12 By Shakespeare’s birth in 1564, the deaths of Erasmus, Martin Luther, Huldrych Zwingli, William Tyndale, Philip Melanchthon, and John Calvin (who died a month after Shakespeare was born) cleared the stage of the most celebrated translators and commentators of the first decades of the Reformation.13 Nevertheless, the work of Bible scholars, Protestant and Catholic, was by no means complete. Indeed, in many respects that work was just beginning. The revolutionary transformation of the Bible following Luther’s dramatic stand on the principle of sola scriptura spawned challenging questions that awaited answers from a new academy of scholars, who in a rapidly changing intellectual world participated in a breathtaking expansion of knowledge of ancient languages and sources that stirred impassioned debates about the nature of the sacred texts. These figures – such as Theodor Beza (1519–1605), Francis Junius (1545–1602), and Immanuel Tremellius (1510–1580) – continued to push biblical scholarship forward, and were heavily responsible for the annotated Latin Bibles read by educated English readers, which were also translated into English. A Jewish convert, Tremellius had strong English ties in part because he served as the Regius professor of Hebrew at Cambridge after 1549; he later collaborated with Junius on an influential Old Testament that was combined with Beza’s New Testament. These and other scholars developed the questions Erasmus had raised about the relationship between philology, history, and the authority of the church. If sola scriptura, that central tenet of the Protestant Reformation, underscored the unique status of the Word of God, then what form of the Bible constituted the authentic text? All agreed that the late-medieval Vulgate was in desperate need of revision, but the way forward was far from clear. What was the authority of received texts in light of expanding philological, linguistic, and historical learning? Could there be original texts and, if so, which were they? In Europe, the age of Shakespeare witnessed a period of scholarly tumult as new knowledge overwhelmed and radically transformed biblical studies. Debates about texts and sources were confined to a small but growing cadre of learned men trained in languages and theology; these learned individuals belonged to a flourishing humanist culture in Europe, from Rome to Scandinavia, held together by complex webs of scholarly networks that extended across confessional boundaries.14 Small in number,

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these figures brought about a revolution. Between 1550 and 1650, Semitic and Oriental languages, rabbinic studies, and history became established disciplines in universities and academies. Printers, such as the house of Christopher Plantin in Antwerp, wove together the latest scholarship with the skill of producing Bibles in vast numbers to serve growing markets among scholars, churchmen, and laity.15 In terms of sacred Scripture, continuity and change in the age of Shakespeare took many forms. While the world of scholarship boiled over in a passion for new learning, the early works of the Reformation continued to exert enormous influence on the lives of the faithful. In German-speaking lands, Luther’s Bible remained unrivalled in Protestant churches, except in Switzerland, where the revised Zurich translation by Huldrych Zwingli held fast as the established edition.16 In England, the words of William Tyndale continued to speak to new generations of lay people, yet the most popular Bibles by Shakespeare’s time had revised Tyndale’s wording and added extensive notes, reflecting a new generation of Protestant scholarship.17 The hands of printers, the minds of scholars, and the eyes of readers were never idle, and one struggles to convey the sheer diversity and unbounded energy that characterized work on the Bible across Europe. Perhaps most remarkable was the cross pollination of biblical scholarship. In Geneva, for example, Beza’s Greek New Testament appeared one year after Shakespeare’s birth, printed with both the Latin of the Vulgate and his own Latin translation.18 This edition followed an earlier New Testament by Beza that formed the foundation for the most significant development for the English Bible in the second half of the century, the Geneva Bible of 1560. Among Catholics, the Council of Trent, which had concluded in 1563, strongly affirmed the authority of the Vulgate while permitting vernacular translations approved by the Catholic Church.19 In Antwerp, Christopher Plantin produced an eightvolume polyglot in 1572, an extraordinary work that took four years to print under the financial support of Philip II of Spain.20 In 1582, the first English Catholic New Testament was accordingly produced in Rheims by English Catholic exiles (the Old Testament was finished in 1610). This heavily annotated translation of the Vulgate not only gave English Catholics a text, it supplied them and curious Protestants with extensive notes about correct “orthodox” readings and the mistakes of Protestant “heretics.” Numerous “confutations” of this Bible and its notes appeared, filling the English marketplace with still more Catholic Bibles and more angry Protestant animadversions.

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Ancient Languages and Texts During Shakespeare’s lifetime, the study of the Bible was transformed by an extraordinary growth in knowledge of Semitic languages and textual traditions with significant consequences for the major texts of the Reformation and post-Reformation worlds, including the Septuagint, the Greek New Testament, the Masoretic Bible, and the Vulgate. The growing interest and knowledge of ancient languages among both Protestants and Catholics, which lay at the root of the Reformation, came to pose serious questions about the nature and veracity of the sacred texts.21 The first complete Reformation Bibles, which appeared in Zurich (1531) and Wittenberg (1534), placed the Hebrew Old Testament together with the Greek New, and owed a great deal to the recovered tradition of Hebrew language and rabbinic commentary. The two editions of the Rabbinic Bible printed by Bomberg in Venice in 1517 and 1524/5 provided Protestant and Catholic reformers with an established form of the Masoretic text. In placing the Hebrew Bible with the Greek New Testament, both Protestant and Catholic scholars, such as Thomas Cajetan, believed that they were returning to the original sources, the only true foundation for translations into the tongues of all Christian men and women.22 Christian humanists of the Reformation had relied on the Rabbinic Bible, but by the 1560s considerable doubt was cast on both the reliability of the Masoretic text and the idea of an original Bible from which scholars could work. A key figure was the remarkable Elijah Levita (1469–1549), who in 1538 published his Massoret ha-Massoret, in which he claimed that the vocalization and pointing of the Hebrew Bible did not originate from the law of Moses, but were a later work of the Masorites who lived in Tiberias after the closing of the Talmud.23 The brilliant Frenchman Guillaume Postel (1510–81) made an astonishing and varied contribution to development of linguistic knowledge. Long derided as an eccentric and a heretic, Postel is now widely recognized as one of the most accomplished philologists and Orientalists of his age.24 He pioneered the study of Samaritan, Ethiopic, and other languages, and uncovered the nature of the original Hebrew script.25 He also insisted on the study of Arabic, which he regarded as essential to contemporary understanding of ancient texts. He was the first European to learn Samaritan, and during his travels in the east encountered the Samaritan Pentateuch, thought to predate the Masoretic text.26 Postel’s reading of the Samaritan Pentateuch anticipated the enormous influence the text would have when it entered Western scholarship in the seventeenth century. As a possible

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source of the Septuagint, the Samaritan Pentateuch brought into question the reliance on the Masoretic established by the Bomberg Rabbinic Bible. Trade with and travel to the Ottoman Empire had opened the door to new sources for the study of the Bible.27 New vistas were opening through the work of Joseph Scaliger, Isaac Causabon, and Johannes Buxtorf, all of whom made available much greater knowledge of Jewish texts, rituals, and customs.28 Students of the Bible were less inclined to look for single lines of authority or tradition, and turned increasingly toward complex lineages of texts shaped and reworked over the course of history. Scaliger, for example, used Jewish sources in 1583 to establish his Christian chronology.29 The early seventeenth century saw tremendous interest in the publication of rabbinic texts, and by the end of the century the entire text of the Mishnah had been printed.30 Not all scholars, however, accepted the criticism of the Masoretic text, and in 1618–19 Johannes Buxtorf the Elder published an entire Hebrew Bible based on the Bomberg text, which he augmented through the addition of Targums and rabbinic commentaries.31 Aramaic, the language of the Targums, was at the forefront of study of the Semitic languages, although it was not unknown to the earlier reformers. Sebastian Münster in Basel had produced the first extensive Aramaic grammar in 1527, which was followed by a grammar by Postel in 1538. A significant advance in the language was made with the appearance in 1554 of another Aramaic grammar, this time by Angelo Canini.32 Considered the language of Christ and the Apostles, Syriac was recognized by early modern scholars as essential to the study of the Bible.33 It was widely believed that the fifth-century Syriac New Testament, known as the Peschitta, might be closer to the original than Jerome’s Greek text.34 Once more, Guillaume Postel played a pioneering role. He was appointed professor in Vienna and worked with Johann Albrecht Widmanstadt, whose edition of the Syriac New Testament was printed in 1555. Widmanstadt wrote in his dedication of the work to Ferdinand of Austria that more scholars than ever were able to read Hebrew and Aramaic, which went a long way to rectifying the effects of the multiplicity of languages following the Tower of Babel. Ten years later, in 1569, another Syriac New Testament was printed, this time in Geneva. The work was by Tremellius, who was required to use Hebrew characters, as he possessed no Syriac font.35 Tremellius also produced a Syriac grammar, in which he clearly distinguished the language from Aramaic. The contributions by Postel, Widmanstadt, and Tremellius brought Syriac into the company of known languages of the Bible.

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As evidence of the speed with which the new learning was spreading, the Peschitta appeared in the Antwerp Polyglot of 1572. In the second half of the sixteenth century, the study of Arabic entered the biblical work of Northern Europe. Arabic was not previously unknown – the first grammar had been produced in 1505, but the language had been largely associated with medical texts and missionary efforts to Islamic lands.36 Once again the figure of Postel looms large, this time for having produced an Arabic grammar with Arabic type in 1540, enabling the application of the language to biblical studies.37 Postel, who was the first professor of Arabic at the College Royal in Paris, argued that Arabic was a universal language. Decades later, in 1578, another milestone was Franciscus Junius’s Arabic translation of Acts and Corinthians, with a discussion of variants from the Greek. An Arabic version of the Pentateuch appeared in 1622, based on a manuscript owned by Joseph Scaliger.38 Postel and Scaliger led the way for Arabic to became an established subject at European universities in the late-sixteenth and earlyseventeenth centuries, with William Bedwell the founder of Arabic studies in England.39 The growth of knowledge of languages during the sixteenth century was reflected in the Polyglot Bibles, which demonstrated the very best of linguistic scholarship. During Shakespeare’s lifetime, the most significant of these works was the Antwerp Polyglot that emerged between 1569 and 1572 from the house of Plantin under the patronage of Philip II of Spain. The original plan had been to produce a corrected version of the Complutensian Polyglot, but soon a more daring project emerged for, as Alastair Hamilton has commented, two major issues had dominated the biblical world between the two polyglots.40 First, the literal translation of the Old Testament by Santes Pagninus, produced in Lyons in 1528, had brought into relief the discrepancies between the Masoretic text and Jerome’s translation.41 Second, the Masoret ha-Masoret by Elija Levita (mentioned earlier) had cast doubt on the punctuation and vocalization of the received Masoretic text.42 The Antwerp Polyglot, known as the Biblia Regia, depended heavily on the Complutensian Polyglot, using its version of the Hebrew, the Greek of the Septuagint, the Latin Vulgate, and the Onkelos Targum – the Babylonian targum to the Torah supposedly prepared by the convert Onkelos, who lived from c. 35–120 CE.43 Additionally, however, the text was checked closely against the Bomberg Bible of 1525 and the Aldine Septuagint of 1518/9, as well as Erasmus’s fourth edition of his New Testament, and the new Polyglot also contained a much-expanded body of Targums, as well

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as the Syriac New Testament. With heavy reliance on the Bomberg Bible, the editors of the Antwerp Polyglot rejected the suspicions of Levita about the vocalization of the Masoretic text. The Pagninus Old Testament translation was included in the volume of notes, as was the Syriac grammar. In total, the Antwerp Polyglot ran to eight volumes. Yet even as its vast array of linguistic knowledge demonstrated the enormous developments in the study of ancient languages and texts, the Antwerp Polyglot still had at its heart the Latin Vulgate, the Bible of the Catholic Church. Jerome’s translation was given pride of place at the center of the printed page, as it had been also in the Complutensian Polyglot. Following the conclusion of the Council of Trent in 1563, the Antwerp Polyglot was the most significant version of the Catholic Latin Bible until the appearance of the Sixto-Clementine in 1592, which would be established as the official version.

Latin Bibles The Latin Bible, known in the sixteenth century as the Vulgate, continued to occupy a central place in both Catholicism and Protestantism in the sixteenth century. Repeated efforts were made to purge Jerome’s translation of errors and to produce the best possible edition. The Council of Trent in the 1540s declared the Vulgate to be the official Bible of the Catholic Church. Lutheran churches continued to use the Vulgate as their principal Latin Bible. Nevertheless, during the Reformation period a series of new Latin translations from Hebrew and Greek appeared from both Protestant and Catholic scholars.44 Although Latin was not a sacred language on par with Hebrew and Greek, it was the language of the church and of education, and churches poured considerable resources into producing translations that had multiple purposes. The Bibles were used to aid the clergy in learning the ancient languages, primarily Hebrew, and the doctrinal principles of the faith, while at the same time they served to represent the very best scholarship of the Protestant churches. For Catholics, the principal goal was the reform of the Vulgate.45 The influence of Erasmus was again decisive. The Novum Instrumentum of 1516 had seen the Greek text set alongside the new Latin version of Erasmus. Erasmus raised crucial questions that Protestant and Catholic scholars would address in the decades to follow: what constitutes a proper translation? And how can the original languages be rendered into faithful yet readable Latin? As noted,

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Erasmus inspired a generation of humanist-trained scholars to learn Hebrew and Greek in order to translate and interpret the Bible. Greater proficiency in these languages, together with the discovery and acquisition of others, opened the door to new questions about the provenance and historical development of the sacred texts. The first major translation of the Old and New Testaments into Latin during the 1520s came from the Dominican Santes Pagninus (1470–1541), whose Veteris et Novi Testamenti nova translatio was printed in Lyons in 1527 after thirty years of labor. Pagninus’s approach was extremely literal, owing greatly to his intention to refute Luther’s private interpretation of Scripture. Pagninus, who had learned Hebrew from a Jewish convert, claimed to have spent more than twenty years working on the Old Testament, which was ultimately issued under the patronage of Leo X, who had died in 1521. Despite attacks from both defenders of the Vulgate and the literary humanists for its lumbering style, the Pagninus translation proved highly influential during the Reformation period, for it was widely used by Protestant commentators, including John Calvin, and was printed in Geneva together with Beza’s New Testament by Robert Estienne in 1565, and then again later in the 1580s.46 With respect to the Vulgate, Pagninus was extremely deferential to Jerome, whom he regarded as the preeminent Christian scholar and translator. Nevertheless, he departed from Jerome at many points in his translation, and his fidelity to the Hebrew revealed numerous problems with the Vulgate text. Pagninus did not see his Latin translation as replacing the Vulgate, which he regarded as holding a special place in the life of the church. The Dominican sought to defend the church from the chaos caused by the multiple interpretations of Scripture unleashed by Protestant heretics; his complete translation of the New and Old Testaments, he argued, was to serve the church in enabling the learning of original languages while remaining within the boundaries of orthodoxy. Six years after the publication of the Pagninus edition, the first Protestant translation of the whole Hebrew Bible into Latin appeared, the work of Sebastian Münster in Basel, who along with Konrad Pellikan was a pioneer of Protestant Christian Hebraism.47 Münster followed Pagninus, but to a different end. Like the Dominican, the former Franciscan produced a highly literal translation of the Hebrew into Latin. Emulating Erasmus’s New Testament, Münster placed the Hebrew text and his own Latin translation in parallel columns. What

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distinguished his Biblia Hebraica, however, was the liberal use Münster made of rabbinic commentaries in his notes. Münster’s purpose was twofold: first, his careful rendering of the Hebrew was intended to help students learn the language by providing the closest possible Latin reading of the text; and, second, by placing the rabbinic sources with the translation he sought to follow the interpretive methods of both Erasmus and the Jewish tradition by demonstrating that the text could sustain multiple readings. Until the appearance of the Tremellius-Junius Bible fifty years later, Münster’s Hebrew/Latin Old Testament remained the most influential Protestant tool for both the learning of the ancient language and philology. Calvin’s notes for his commentaries on the Old Testament clearly reveal his indebtedness to the Basel Hebraist.48 In 1543, ten years after Münster’s Biblia Hebraica, the scholars of Zurich produced a Latin Bible that differed from that predecessor in significant ways. Under the lead of Leo Jud, the Zurichers sought an approach that mediated between, on the one hand, a simple, literal reading in Latin that was as faithful as possible to the syntax of the original Hebrew and, on the other hand, an elegance of language found in good Latin.49 Whereas Pagninus and Münster were largely intended as pedagogical works, the Biblia Sacrosancta in Zurich was a book of the church, not for liturgical use, but as an expression of its doctrine and worship, of its history and tradition as a true church.50 With the 1543 Zurich Bible, Reformed Protestants had provided a Latin Bible that was an expression of their theology and polity. Their work proved a model for the most influential Latin Bible of the age of Shakespeare, the Tremellius-Junius Veteris Testamenti, which began to be published in 1579. In the 1550s, a vicious row broke out between Calvin and Beza, in Geneva, and Sebastian Castellio, in Basel, who in 1552 had produced a Latin Bible quite dissimilar from any other.51 Unlike other Protestant translators, Castellio took a free hand in translating the Hebrew and Greek into elegant classical Latin, arguing that the Word of God should be rendered in the very best language. Calvin was outraged by Castellio’s seemingly cavalier reading of Scripture and wanton abandonment of traditional vocabulary, and by the inclusion of extrabiblical material (from Josephus) in his translation.52 The ensuing battle became one of the most significant intra-Protestant debates about the nature of the Bible, and much of the work Beza put into his New Testament was designed to refute Castellio. For the Savoyard, translation was a gift of the Spirit free from the constraints of human

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language, while in Geneva the link between doctrine, scholarship, and translation was not to be broken. The fullest expression of the Genevan position followed in the 1570s with the appearance of a Latin translation of the Old Testament with extensive textual apparatus. Shortly after its first printing in Frankfurt, the Bible appeared from the press of Middleton and Barker in London in 1580. This Old Testament was paired with Beza’s Latin New Testament, and the work became the most widely consulted Protestant Latin Bible of the latesixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Between 1580 and 1743 nine editions appeared in London alone. The Veteris Testamenti was continuously revised by Junius after Tremellius’s death in 1580. What emerged in the period between 1580 and Junius’s death in 1603 was nothing less than a Reformed book of knowledge. The prefaces contain extensive treatments of theological loci while the notes, particularly those for the first twenty-five chapters of Genesis, reveal Junius’s plan to draw together all learning (geography, history, languages, theology, and natural science) under the wisdom of the Word.

Reforming the Vulgate At issue through the Reformation was the relationship of the new humanist learning to the established Bible of the church, the Vulgate, Jerome’s fifthcentury translation from Hebrew and Greek.53 The accretion of errors in the text was well known through the Middle Ages, but the question of how to reform the Bible was far more controversial.54 Erasmus had been shocked by the storm of controversy his New Testament caused and sought to defend himself against accusations that he was directly attacking the Vulgate. Yet, at the same time, he was fully aware that the Latin Bible of the Catholic Church was a terrible mess, full of errors and probably with little of Jerome’s original language intact. Erasmus claimed his work as in the service of the Vulgate, not as an assault on its authority, and in a quiet way Protestants concurred. Throughout the sixteenth century, the Vulgate remained a highly esteemed Bible for Protestants, both Lutheran and Reformed, on account of its antiquity and association with Jerome, who was widely regarded in the Renaissance as the model scholar of the Bible.55 The preface to the Zurich Latin Bible of 1543 opened with a quotation from Jerome’s letter to Pope Damasus. Although a Latin translation of parts of the Old Testament appeared from Luther’s circle in Wittenberg in 1529, throughout the

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sixteenth century Lutheran churches continued to print and read editions of the Vulgate.56 Likewise, in Reformed printing centers such as Basel and Geneva, the Vulgate continued to be produced in large numbers, providing significant income for Protestant printers.57 With respect to editions of the Vulgate in the first half of the sixteenth century, the most significant figure was Robert Estienne (1503–59), an extraordinary scholar and printer, who converted to the Protestant cause and moved to Geneva from the court in Paris. His 1528 Vulgate was heralded as the most carefully revised edition of the Bible, based on consultation of a broad range of ancient sources. Estienne followed Erasmus on many points in correcting the Latin, although theologically he maintained a fairly traditional reading of the text.58 His crowning achievement was his Vulgate produced in Paris in 1540, for which he listed sixteen manuscripts and three printed editions as his sources, crediting the professor of Hebrew, François Vatable, for the scholarship. By the time of Shakespeare’s birth, the leading edition of the Latin Vulgate in the Catholic Church came from Louvain and was the work of Johannes Hentenius (1499–1566).59 First appearing in 1547, Hentenius’s Vulgate was supported by the Catholic theological faculty at Louvain, and was in part intended to refute the Vatable Bible produced by Estienne in 1538 with its Protestant paratextual material. Hentenius’s preface claimed that his text had been checked against much older editions of the Vulgate, offering the best opportunity for a pure text. For Hentenius, the standard by which his Vulgate was measured was not Hebrew and Greek. Rather, he looked to the antiquity of the ancient witnesses of Jerome’s Bible. The Hentenius Vulgate was printed nine times between 1559 and 1579 and became, to some extent, the official Latin Bible of the Catholic Church. The Council of Trent rejected the work of biblical humanists and declared that the Vulgate “which by the lengthened usage of so many years has been approved of in the Church, be, in public lectures, disputations, sermons, and expositions, held as authentic.”60 The other translations of the sixteenth century, Catholic and Protestant, were not to be considered, as the antiquity of the Vulgate alone sufficed for the authority of the church. In the following decades, however, Catholic churchmen remained fully cognizant that the Bible of the church was in desperate need of revision. The result was the edition of 1590, which relied heavily on the Estienne and Louvain Vulgates, but had a very unhappy story. The work had been carried out by a team of distinguished scholars, some of whom had worked on the 1586 edition of the Septuagint, but Pope Sixtus V, who

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fancied himself a Bible scholar and sought to lead the editing committee, caused mayhem. The result was a rushed and botched edition riddled with errors, and the Vulgata Sixtina was widely derided, only to be withdrawn. The 1592 edition of the Vulgate was printed to look like the ill-fated 1590 text, but with the versification of the Old and New Testaments restored and numerous corrections made to the text. The Sixto-Clementine Vulgate, named for Popes Sixtus V and Clement VIII, became the official Bible of the Roman church in the early modern period.

England In England, Shakespeare knew the Geneva and the Bishops’ Bibles. The former was the work of eleven men, a group of Reformed exiles who had found refuge in Calvin’s city, including William Whittingham, who oversaw the entire translation project, Anthony Gilby, and Miles Coverdale.61 Whittingham, who eventually returned to England to serve as preacher before Elizabeth I, prepared the New Testament (which was completed in 1557), while Gilby was responsible for the Old. The whole Bible appeared in Geneva in 1560, although it was not printed in England until 1576. The Geneva Bible, which went through an astonishing 140 editions between 1560 and 1644, served its readers well. Relatively inexpensive and replete with extensive notes to aid understanding, the Geneva Bible was an expansion of Theodor Beza’s 1557 New Testament, retaining the latter’s twenty-six woodcuts and five maps.62 Among the Geneva Bible’s distinguishing features was its versification, which followed Estienne’s New Testament of 1551. The Bible itself was a translation from the Hebrew and Greek, and for linguistic assistance the English scholars in Geneva had drawn on the expertise of Theodor Beza and his circle as well as on extensive rabbinic material.63 In their translation the scholars sought fidelity to the original languages, and difficulties were explained in the notes, which were also characterized by their strong adherence to Genevan Calvinism.64 In the introductory letter to the reader, the translators declared that the Geneva Bible was the most learned Bible in English of its time, a claim that was well founded. The translation of the Geneva Old Testament remained largely as it was, but the revision of the New Testament in 1575 by Laurence Tomson, undertaken in light of Beza’s 1565 edition of the New Testament, was more Calvinist in character, with Tomson’s notes, the summaries of Beza, and annotations by Joachim Camerarius from Pierre L’Oiseleur’s edition of Beza. Tomson’s edition of the New Testament became the standard

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version of the Geneva Bible in 1587. In 1599 the notes for Revelation, which Tomson had left undone, were provided by Franciscus Junius and had first appeared in English in 1592.65 Junius’s work was the most influential commentary on Revelation in English.66 During the reign of Elizabeth I, the decree that a folio Bible in English should be in every parish was reaffirmed, and during the 1560s this folio remained the Great Bible of 1539, which had been authorized by Henry VIII to be read in parish churches. To fill the needs of the Elizabethan church, the Great Bible was printed in 1561, 1562, and 1566. The scholarship behind the Geneva Bible, however, cast light on problems with the Great Bible, and the need for a revised official translation was keenly felt. For three years, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Matthew Parker, oversaw a team of translators, many of whom were bishops, who produced what naturally became known as the Bishops’ Bible in 1568, and then extensively revised in 1572. The translators were instructed to follow the Great Bible except where other scholarly works, such as those of Santes Pagninus and Sebastian Münster, demanded changes. The result was truly disappointing, and the translations, particularly of the Old Testament, were poorly done. Yet the Bishops’ Bible was a relative success, being established in England as a pulpit Bible and never intended to rival the popularity of the Geneva Bible. As a Bible authorized for public reading in churches, the Bishops’ Bible did not have the controversial Calvinist notes that distinguished the Geneva Bible. Such was Protestant production in England, but Catholic exiles were active in France, where they produced alternative English translations: the Rheims New Testament of 1582, followed by the Douay Old Testaments of 1609 and 1610. The Testaments were the work of the scholarly English priest Gregory Martin, who provided translations from the Vulgate that were much admired for their precision.67 His work was both scholarly and polemical, intended to demonstrate the errors of Protestantism at every turn, even though it is clear he drew heavily on Tyndale’s work. As a translation from the Vulgate, however, in style the Douay-Rheims Bible drew heavily on Latinate forms, although its language was robust and vernacular. The arguments of the Rheims letter to the reader in the New Testament provide evidence of a Catholic position on the nature of the biblical text. When the Greek and Latin differed, the latter had been preferred. Translations were to be dependent on the best possible original sources of the Vulgate and should be as literal as possible. Ambiguities in the text were not to be ironed out in the translation, but left to stand; they could be

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explained in the notes, which brought forward the teaching of the church. The Rheims New Testament was reprinted in 1621, 1633, and 1738, but its influence extended much further, with evidence suggesting that the translators of the King James Bible made extensive use of the Catholic New Testament. Such was not the case for the Douay Old Testament, which arrived too late to have much influence on the King James. During Elizabeth’s reign there was one Bible for the church, the Bishops’ Bible, and one for the people, the Geneva Bible. Calls for a single vernacular translation found little echo until the 1604 conference assembled by James VI/I at Hampton Court to settle religious debates, where Puritan John Reynolds called for a new translation of the Bible, drawing attention to the errors in the current editions. Only thirteen years old when he approved the Geneva Bible in Scotland, the king now declared it the worst. Most egregious in his eyes were notes that seemed to promote sedition and treachery.68 His solution was: one uniform translation . . . to be done by the best learned in both the Universities [Oxford and Cambridge], after them to be reviewed by the Bishops and the chief learned of the Church; from them to be presented to the Privy Council, and lastly to be ratified by his royal authority; and so this whole Church to be bound unto it, and none other.69

As scholars have now recognized, the King James Bible proved the crowning glory of William Tyndale, for his words account for approximately 80 percent of the translation. The commissions were given fourteen rules to guide their work, which was not to be a revision of the Geneva Bible; instead they were to use the 1602 edition of the Bishops’ Bible. At the king’s command no marginalia were to be included, except when necessary to explain the meaning of a word. The traditional vocabulary of the church was to be maintained. The work was done by six companies located in Oxford, Cambridge, and Westminster. Each member translated the relevant verses individually; the results were then compared and a final version agreed. Once a book was completed, it was sent to the other companies for inspection. Between 1604 and 1608 the companies produced drafts of the translations, much of it taking the form of revisions to the Bishops’ Bible, and a general meeting worked through the translations and annotations before the text was printed in 1611. Although the Bishops’ Bible was the foundational text, many of the changes still came from the Geneva Bible. The translators’ primary concern was to produce not elegant English, but a vernacular version as faithful to

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the original as possible. The Epistle Dedicatory expressed the translators’ intention to provide “one more exact translation of the Holy Scriptures into the English tongue.”70 The King James Bible includes a calendar, almanac, and genealogies of Scripture, as well as a beautifully drawn map of the holy land. Although the King James contains no marginal notes of doctrinal explanation, it contains 8,422 notes consisting of alternative readings and basic historical information; a further 494 were added by later editors, giving 9,916 notes in most standard texts. There were also 8,990 cross-references, as well as chapter summaries, no longer found in modern editions.71 Despite the great labors lavished on the King James Bible, its appearance in 1611 was something of a damp squib, offering little competition to the Geneva Bible, the Bible of the people. The Geneva Bible would remain the most popular form of Scripture until it was banned under the influence of Archbishop William Laud, although even Laud continued to use the Geneva in his sermons until the late 1620s.72 With a printing monopoly in England for commercial and political reasons, ultimately the King James Bible gained, in David Norton’s words, “a unique hold on the English consciousness.”73

Conclusion The Bibles of the Reformation and post-Reformation periods were by no means static entities. The revolution launched by Erasmus in 1516 and fueled by Luther and Zwingli became a continuous revolution. During Shakespeare’s lifetime seismic changes were still underway in how the Bible was printed, read, and interpreted. These changes were bound up with how both Protestant and Catholic communities were suffused with the words of Scripture in its ancient and modern languages. Yet what constituted the Word of God was increasingly debated, as Reformation certainties unraveled. The Catholic response was to reify the Vulgate, while among Protestants greater knowledge brought ever more questions. After Shakespeare was dead, such contestations were still writ large in the seventeenth century in the work of Thomas Hobbes and Baruch Spinoza.74 The writings of Shakespeare are replete with the words of Tyndale and other translators, but the challenges for the cultures of the early modern Bible are well summed up in Antonio’s caution in The Merchant of Venice: “Mark you this, Bassanio, the devil can cite Scripture for his purpose.”75

chapter 2

The Trouble with Translation: Paratexts and England’s Bestselling New Testament Aaron T. Pratt

In 1825, the Bodleian Library received a collection of twenty-one English Bibles and New Testaments from the estate of Mrs. Eliza Dennis Denyer. All represent editions published in England before 1580, and most date from the earliest years of Protestantism in the country, before Mary I acceded to the throne in 1553. This was and is now a valuable collection, both in terms of research and resale potential. Indeed, in an 1890 history of the Bodleian, William Dunn Macray describes this acquisition as “the chief distinction of [1825],” and lists a few of its treasures: Coverdale’s second edition, 1537; Cranmer’s, in April, 1540 and in 1541, and by Grafton in 1553; Matthew’s, by Becke, in 1551; Tyndale’s New Testament, in 1536, and another of his earliest editions; Hollybush’s English and Latin Testament, 1538, and Erasmus’ Testament, 1540, on yellow paper.1

While three of these descriptions carry the familiar names of English Bibles – the Coverdale and Matthew Bibles and the Tyndale New Testament – the rest are likely more obscure to twenty-first-century critics. When he compiled this list, though, Macray was simply following terminology offered by the printed books themselves. The Coverdale volume may not identify its namesake on the title page, but it attaches the iconic translator’s name to a dedication that promptly follows.2 The first of the “Cranmer” editions that Macray lists includes a “prologe by Thomas [Cranmer] archbysshop of Cantorbury,” and it alerts readers to this fact on the title page.3 The 1551 Bible specifies that it was “faythfully set furth according to ye copy of Thomas Mathewes traunslacion,” and Edward Becke signs the dedication.4 The Tyndale title pages name Tyndale.5 On copies of a Latin–English New Testament that he issued in 1538, the Southwark stationer James Nicholson names “Iohan Hollybushe” as the English translator, and an English New Testament published by Richard Grafton and Edward Whitchurch in 1540 advertises that it follows “the texte of master Erasmus.”6 33

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In more recent decades, scholarship has relied on two bibliographical works for information about surviving English Bibles and New Testaments: Herbert’s revision of Darlow and Moule’s Historical Catalogue of Printed Editions of The English Bible 1525–1961 (1968) and the second edition of A Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, and Ireland and of English Books Printed Abroad 1475–1640 (1976–1991).7 These landmark publications impose a nearly identical taxonomy onto the hundreds of Bible and New Testament editions that became available during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and this taxonomy looks rather different from Macray’s. Of the editions in his list, for example, only two retain the same labels when they appear in these newer reference volumes: the Tyndale New Testaments are still Tyndale Testaments, and the Coverdale Bibles are still Coverdale Bibles. His Cranmer’s Bibles, however, are now Great Bibles, named for the imposing size of the version’s pulpit editions. And while “Matthew” remains the label applied to some Bibles, the specific edition that appears in Macray’s loses it. The Short-Title Catalogue (STC) entry for the relevant edition includes this note: “Actually Becke’s revision of Taverner’s version, w. N. T. in Tyndale’s version.”8 In preparation for an edition that reached readers in 1539, Richard Taverner had revised the 1537 Matthew Bible, and Edward Becke then used that text as the basis for an edition published in 1551, the edition the Denyer book represents. The English-language text attributed to “Johan Hollybushe” in the dual-language volume is essentially Coverdale’s work, so it becomes a Coverdale.9 Finally, the “Erasmus” New Testament in Macray’s list is based on the Great Bible translation, so it becomes a Great Bible. When attempting to make sense of the variety of Bibles and New Testaments printed in English, these two catalogs thus prioritize translation, rather than the print history of Scripture, as a categorizing principle. (We might note the irony of this, since, as bibliographies, the catalogs are ostensibly focused on documenting books as objects.) In sum, the criterion that both Herbert and the STC use to categorize Bibles and New Testaments prioritizes the pedigree of the translation – as determined by modern scholars – over the way the books present themselves. By tabling our categories and approaching early editions on their own terms, this chapter seeks to provide a new account of Protestant Bibles and their early circulation in England, one that provides great insight into what vernacular readers such as Shakespeare were looking for in the printed editions they purchased. It has long been understood that Shakespeare, like other Elizabethan readers, would have had the choice of two competing

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Elizabethan Bibles, the Bishops’ Bible and the Geneva Bible, and that he seemed for various purported reasons to prefer the latter translation. By looking at a largely overlooked New Testament series that spans the Edwardian, Elizabethan, and Jacobean eras, I hope to demonstrate that translation was only one of the features that mattered to early modern readers, and that Bibles did not at that time fall into the categories neatly arranged by later bibliographers. An accurate text was surely a sine qua non for both the learned humanist and the average English reader, but when we sort Bibles much like Macray did, by the features they advertise, we learn that the readers who kept the market afloat looked for paratext and physical size above all else. Translation, per se, appears often to have been a secondary consideration. In fact, in light of this study, it might even be wrong to use the term “paratext” with these books at all, at least insofar as “para” implies a subordinate position in a hierarchy of value. Almanacs, liturgical calendars, commentaries, and other aids to the reader were very much texts, central features that distinguished Bibles and New Testaments from each other – even in cases where the translation remained the same. And when translation did affect reception, it could do so in ways that trouble the categories we apply to the period. As with Macray’s “Erasmus’ Testament,” English Bibles – from the beginnings under Henry VIII and Edward VI, well into the reigns of Elizabeth I, James I, and beyond – could and did traffic under labels that we have forgotten. Modern taxonomies, then, have obscured from view the actual Bibles and New Testaments that shaped the scriptural encounters of Shakespeare and his contemporaries.

The Book Trade Origins of a Biblical Bestseller In a letter sent on October 5, 1568, with a brand-new Bishops’ Bible folio specially bound for Elizabeth, Archbishop Matthew Parker asks of William Cecil that “Jug only may have the preferment of this edicion, for yf any other shuld Lurche him to steale from him thes copies, he weare a great Loser in this first doing. And Sir without doubt he hath well deserved to be preferred.”10 “Jug,” here, refers to Richard Jugge, the London stationer who worked with Parker to issue England’s new official Bible. According to the archbishop’s petition, Jugge not only printed the Bishops’ version (what Parker calls an “edicion”) but was also its financier and, thus, stood to be a “great Loser” if sales suffered as the result of competition. When Jugge undertook to publish the Bishops’ Bible, he was no newcomer to Scripture. Years earlier, in January 1551, he had secured an eight-year patent to print New Testaments in English.11 He would issue his first

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edition in 1552, and until Edward VI died and Mary I clamped down on English Bibles altogether, the only New Testaments that came from English presses were published by Jugge. On March 24, 1560, not long after Elizabeth took the throne, the new queen appointed him and John Cawood to the office of Royal Printer. (Cawood had previously held the position under Mary I.) In 1560, though, this patent said nothing about Bible publication.12 Nonetheless, when Jugge began printing Elizabethan editions of his older New Testament beginning in or around 1561, his colophons claimed the exclusive right to New Testaments that he enjoyed under Edward VI: the editions were “Imprinted at London in Poules Church yarde by Rychard Iugge, Printer to the Quenes Maiestie, forbyddynge all other men to prynt or cause to be printed, this, or any other Testament in Englyshe.”13 With his reasserted New Testament printing rights and the new Bishops’ Bible preferment combined, Jugge had secured what amounted to a de facto monopoly. Certainly fellow members of the book trade recognized it as one. Less than a month after Matthew Parker died in the middle of May 1575, Jugge found himself without a patron and up against a group of London stationers at the Court of High Commission. For the highest ecclesiastical court in England to get involved, tensions had to have been high: the market for Bibles and New Testaments was expanding – like the market for print more broadly – and others were clamoring to reap the profits.14 While in front of the High Commission on June 6, Jugge agreed to have his privilege restricted only to quarto Bibles and sixteenmo (“decimo Sexto”) New Testaments. On June 9, the Stationers’ Company then confirmed that it would enforce the order and issue licenses on approval to other publishers.15 Most significantly, Jugge lost the folio Bishops’ Bibles that initially earned him his preferment as well as what had proven to be a successful line of New Testaments in octavo. Jugge died in the autumn of 1577, and the office of Royal Printer went to Sir Thomas Wilkes, who promptly sold it to Christopher Barker for “a great somme.”16 Barker’s patent, granted on September 27, 1577, gave him control over “Bibles and New Testaments in the English tongue of any translation with or without notes, printed or to be printed by royal command.”17 This marked the first time that Bibles were expressly given to the Royal Printer in his patent. Like Jugge, however, Barker had been attracted to Bible publishing before securing the office. In fact, there is reason to suggest that Barker purchased the position from Wilkes with his eye specifically on the profitable Bible market. On the same day that the Stationers’ Company committed to enforcing the High Commission’s

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order concerning Jugge, Christopher Barker agreed also to respect Jugge’s right to sixteenmo New Testaments and quarto Bibles. Apparently just before he made this commitment, Barker had secured a license to print A Byble in Englishe with notes in the same which was dedicated unto hir maiestie in the ffirst yere of her highnes reign and commenly called or knowen by the name of the Geneva Byble and a Testament to be translated out of the latin tonge into the Englishe (the Latin copie thereof by hir highnes privledge) belonginge to one Thomas Vautrolier a frenchman.18

Barker would not become a member of the Stationers’ Company until June 1578, but he published his first New Testament in 1575 and began printing them himself in 1576. Nevertheless, it is clear that Barker wanted to curry favor with the organization in 1575 – probably anticipating his future membership – and agreed to honor Jugge’s (restricted) privilege. At least, until Jugge died. Protest against printing monopolies did not go away with Jugge, however, and, at the beginning of 1584, Barker and a number of other patent holders agreed to surrender control of some books “for the reliefe of ye poore” of the Stationers’ Company. Barker gave up several distinct books, including the two most vendible volumes of the newe Testament in English, commonlie called master Cheekes translation: that is, in the volume called “Octavo” with annotacons as they be now: and in the volume called “Decimo Sexto” of the same translation without Notes, in the Brevier English letter onely. Provided that master Barker himselfe print the sayde Testaments at the lowest value, by the Direction of the master and wardeins of the Company of Stationers for the tyme being. Provided allwayes, that master Barker do reteyn some small number of these for diverse services in her maiesties Courtes or ellswhere: And lastlye, that nothing that he yeeldeth vnto by meanes aforesaide, be preiudiciall to her maiesties highe prerogative, or to any that shall succeed in the office of her maiesties printer.19

Both of these “vendible volumes” are New Testaments that Jugge had published under Edward VI and Elizabeth, the “Decimo Sexto” being one of the two product lines that Jugge retained in the wake of the 1575 disputes. After 1577, Barker had the rights under his general patent and he started issuing these octavos shortly thereafter.20 Notably, despite giving up the right to publish new editions of these New Testaments in this 1584 donation, he insists that he “himselfe print [them]” “for the tyme being.” He was still setting himself up to profit. Because there are no surviving black-letter (or “English letter”) sixteenmo editions that were

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printed by Barker – either before 1584 or after – it would appear that neither he nor anyone else wanted to finance one.21 There are surviving octavos, however, the first after his donation is from around 1589.22 By then, Barker had retired to his country home in Datchet and handed over printing operations to a series of deputies. While George Bishop and Ralph Newberry (and, later, Robert Barker, Christopher’s son) took over the bulk of the Royal Printer’s works, it was Thomas Dawson who began printing the octavo line of black-letter New Testaments. Having been an apprentice to Jugge through most of the 1560s, Dawson would have known this book well.23 He also would have known that it was a strong seller.

“Master Cheekes” Translation The “‘Octavo’ with annotacons” that Barker donated had originated with Jugge in or around 1553, after at least one similar edition in quarto – Jugge’s first New Testament – and it stayed in print until at least 1619, when Bonham Norton and John Bill printed the last recorded edition.24 This makes it the longest running line of Bibles or New Testaments before the English Civil War. In total, there were thirty-three of these octavo editions, more than any other New Testament and nearly as many as the bestselling Bible of the period, the black-letter Geneva in quarto.25 We also know that it was available to readers even after 1619, with new copies to be found in the warehouse of the King’s Printer until at least 1624/5.26 These copies were presumably of the 1619 edition, though it is possible that one or more editions, now lost, followed that one.27 And this is to say nothing about the second-hand trade, where copies may have found afterlives. Additionally, a Stationers’ Company record indicates that these New Testaments were still a topic of discussion as late as 1635 and suggests that they may also have seen the largest print runs of any Bible or New Testament – up to 6,000 copies per edition.28 If its editions did reach or even approach this size regularly, this blackletter octavo was not only the longest lasting but also the most widely owned book of Scripture in the vernacular. And yet, these books have never been given a feature role in histories of the Bible in England. This in part is because the books survive very poorly, with a number of editions surviving in only one or two copies; they are neither visible nor especially easy to study. Many have not been digitized. Another part of the problem, though, is that some of the books in this series print one translation while others print another. From Jugge’s first edition under Edward VI until 1568, these books include what the modern bibliographies describe as Jugge’s revision

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to Tyndale’s New Testament. From 1568 until 1619, they include the Bishops’ translation. Those in early modern England, however, knew them by neither of these names. As Peter Blayney has observed, Barker’s 1584 gift of New Testaments to the poor of the Stationers’ Company says that these books “commonlie” trafficked under the name of Sir John Cheke.29 By 1584, Barker was printing only one type of black-letter New Testament in octavo, so we can be sure which editions it refers to. The Court Book of the Stationers’ Company further confirms the identity of the books in a record indicating that, in 1606, Dawson gave up to Robert Barker “all the full Right Interest and Clayme to the printinge of the book of holy Scripture called the new Testament in the volume called .Octauo. of mr Cheakes translation.”30 Dawson was only involved in one type of New Testament, the very one that he took over from Christopher Barker. Sir John Cheke, an expert in both Greek and Latin, served as the first Regius professor of Greek at Cambridge University as well as a tutor to Edward VI. Between 1551 and 1553, he began his own translation of the New Testament in English, “trying to purify the language by using words whose etymology was Saxon rather than Latin or French.”31 This translation, however, remained unfinished and never appeared in print during the early modern era. Cheke was dead well before planning for the Bishops’ Bible began, making it curious that the 1584 record would describe the Bishops’ text in Barker’s editions as “master Cheekes translation.” Given that Cheke could not have been associated with the actual translation in the editions Barker had been publishing, then, the name being applied to the books was in all likelihood a carryover from Jugge’s Edwardian editions. So, while current bibliographies describe the translation in those early books as Jugge’s revision of Tyndale, Blayney’s suggestion that it might instead be appropriate to associate the revision with Cheke and not Jugge himself is a fair one: “It may have been Cheke who persuaded Edward that a uniform and more reliable version of the New Testament was needed – and if he contributed to the revision, Jugge would certainly have known.”32 Moreover, Jugge may have known Cheke from his time at Cambridge, making it even more plausible that the two collaborated. Jugge’s dedication to Edward in the earliest editions may provide further support for Cheke’s involvement when it indicates that the stationer received “aduyse [advise] and helpe” on matters of “true Ortographie,” one of Cheke’s special interests.33 Whatever Cheke’s relationship to the book may have been, however, the simple fact that the books were associated with his name points to the conclusion that the label for these

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Figure 2.1 The newe Testamente of our Sauiour Iesu Christ (London: Richard Jugge, [1553]; STC 2870), sigs. π1r and Qq7v. British Library shelfmark C.118.a.29. © The British Library Board.

New Testaments originated before Jugge introduced the Bishops’ Bible translation to them, and probably while Cheke was still alive and active. What matters most for the present discussion is that we see the same name attaching itself to a series of books that differ when it comes to the scriptural text itself. Despite Barker’s donation calling the version a “translation,” continuity with the Edwardian books was achieved through paratext. All thirty-three editions were of the same book, and its long-term success was as that particular book, with its title page and trappings, not as a version of the New Testament text. Around 1568, Jugge swapped out the older translation for the new one sponsored by his patron, but the books do not advertise this change at all. Figures 2.1 and 2.2 depict the title page of Jugge’s octavo from around 1553, the first in the series, and the title page of the edition that Dawson printed around 1589, his first. Though separated by more than thirty-five years, the title pages are quite similar. Only the Jugge edition carries the note of authorization by Edward VI, which was no longer relevant in 1589,

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Figure 2.2 The New Testament of our Sauiuor Iesus Christ (London: Thomas Dawson, [1589]; STC 2887.7), sigs. π1r and Vv4r. Lambeth Palace Library shelfmark E2075 (1589). Photographs courtesy of Lambeth Palace Library.

but the language otherwise matches, minor spelling differences notwithstanding. Both identify themselves as New Testaments “of our Sauiour Iesu Christ,” both employ red ink along with black, both advertise the inclusion of “Notes and expositions of the darke places” (the “annotacons” mentioned in Barker’s donation), both use the same quotation from Matthew 13, and both prominently feature a portrait of Edward VI. Both also report that the text has been “faythfully translated out of the Greke,” despite the fact that the texts in these editions represent distinct translation efforts. In 1553, the woodcut of Edward would have marked the New Testament as new and newly authoritative, as Scripture that carries the imprimatur of England’s reigning monarch. It proclaimed that vernacular Bibles and, by extension, English Protestantism were officially sanctioned. In 1589, it would have signified somewhat differently, identifying the book as one rooted in tradition, as a New Testament associated with the Church of England’s Reformation. The later title page has responded to the shift in

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English book design toward roman and italic fonts that was then in progress, but its content has resisted change. This was a book designed to look like Jugge’s original. It would be misleading to say, however, that the New Testaments in question had a completely consistent appearance from 1553 to 1619. As mentioned, survival of editions in this series is poor – some survive in only one copy, and those that do survive routinely lack a title page, rendering the record incomplete. Nevertheless, it appears that, in 1589, Dawson was restoring Edward’s portrait to the book after a long hiatus; he would retain the portrait for further editions until around 1600. Christopher Barker, beginning with his edition from around 1578, had used a more typical title-page border that was not specific to the New Testament. When Dawson took over, he was in possession of the same block that Jugge had printed in his quarto editions of the Cheke version, but he cut away the elaborate frame to make it look like the (presumably) now-lost octavo cut.34 In 1605, Dawson replaced Edward with a similar medallion portrait of James I, England’s new monarch. This, however, does not appear to have lasted beyond a single edition: Robert Barker began using a title-page border of his own when he started printing the book the next year. Among other things, it depicts the Tetragrammaton at the top and the royal coat of arms at the bottom.35 This still connects Scripture to James’s authority, but in a way that is arguably vested more in the crown than James himself. Norton and Bill would go on to use this same border for octavo New Testaments of the King James Bible (KJV). Even though the KJV eclipsed other product lines within a few years of its publication in 1611, no octavo New Testaments of the version saw the light until 1621. For years, the series that originated with Jugge remained vital enough to resist the rise of the new Authorized Version. Because he died in 1616, Shakespeare himself would never have known a world without the Cheke New Testament. What does stay consistent from 1553 to 1619 is the title-page text discussed above. What is also consistent is the content – or at least the rhetoric – of the paratexts, which stress the importance of biblical literacy, the central doctrines of Protestantism, and Church of England attendance. These were not the scholarly editions of humanists: they, instead, were for the everyday Protestant. In this sense they are similar to the popular blackletter Geneva quartos mentioned earlier, despite representing different translations and formats. At the beginning of the earliest edition, Jugge prints the patent guaranteeing his New Testament privilege as well as a dedication to Edward, which is then followed by a liturgical calendar and

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an almanac. Later editions omit the patent and, eventually, the dedication.36 Jugge editions, both those with the Tyndale translation and those with the Bishops’, then include an alphabetized “Table of the Principall matters conteyned in this Testament.”37 In Jugge’s original edition from the early 1550s, this table runs to thirty-nine pages; by his final edition, from around 1575, it was up to forty-one, or more than two and one-half sheets of paper. Because it comes before the New Testament rather than after, it feels especially long. Understandably, Barker dropped this, replacing it with three shorter paratexts, which run for a total of thirteen pages, or less than one full octavo sheet. One is a preface explaining the central issues in the New Testament, specifically that it details the “whole mystery of our saluation and redemption”;38 another is a multipage chart that categorizes each book of the New Testament and summarizes it; and the third is a short document that describes the New Testament’s primary teachings. Following these, both Jugge and later editions offer “A true and perfect rekenynge of the yeares and tyme, from Adam vnto Christe” as determined by Scripture and a group of Bible verses – both Old and New Testament – that provide a scriptural argument for studying Scripture.39 Jugge editions then print a woodcut map of the Promised Land, which later editions replace with a page listing the books of the New Testament in order, “with their proper names and number of Chapters.”40 After the New Testament text itself, all of these books indicate “The Epistles of the olde Testament, accordyng as they be nowe read [in church]” and assist the church-going reader with “A table to fynde the pistles [sic] and Gospels reade in the churche of Englande, whereof the fyrst lyne is the Epistle, and the other the Gospell.”41 The calendar and almanacs at the beginning and the material at the end of these compact volumes were all designed to facilitate – and, arguably, to regulate – the reader’s spiritual life within the Church of England. Scripture is bibliographically central in the books, but these paratexts, which sit at either end of it, insist that the Bible should be understood within the official context of the church. They frame the encounter with Scripture as a part of an encounter with England’s Protestant community. Both the short discussion of biblical chronology leading up to the New Testament and the woodcut map in the Jugge editions whet an interest in Scripture as history – something that roman-letter Geneva quartos do in a more sustained way – and Jugge’s index conveys the range of content in the New Testament text. The chart Barker borrowed from earlier quarto Bishops’ Bibles to replace the index achieves this latter goal too, though in a more compact and schematic way.42 The two discursive texts he also

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includes explicitly ask the book’s audience to examine what they read for soteriological and moral significance. God fulfilled the promise of the Old Testament, they say, and provided Christ for the salvation of mankind. The first, which proceeds in a hortatory mood – “let vs beare in minde,” “let vs direct our hearts” – invites every reader to consider themselves one of “Gods dear elect” and read Scripture accordingly, as a guide to the life of a true Christian. The books emphasize that reading the New Testament, when done with the appropriate spiritual disposition, constitutes an act of devotion – maybe even a sign of assurance of salvation.43 But, of course, they simultaneously emphasize that this is not enough: one must also go to church. The paratexts stressing church attendance distinguish these octavos from the other octavo line available under the Barkers, the so-called Geneva–Tomson, which was printed in roman letter and lacks any apparatus connected with the Church of England.

Annotations on the “Darke Places” The importance of the book’s focus on official worship is hard to overstate, and may in fact have been the primary selling point, but the feature of these books that is the most obvious to us today is the set of “annotacons” highlighted in Barker’s donation, the “Notes and expositions of the darke places” promised by each edition’s title page. These, printed as endnotes keyed to the text rather than marginal notes (see Figures 2.1 and 2.2), are unique to this line of Cheke New Testaments. Jugge did not inherit them from earlier Tyndale Bibles, and they found their way into no other books. With the exception of his three early quarto editions – two in the early 1550s and one in the mid-1560s – these notes belonged exclusively to blackletter octavo New Testaments: the commentary they contain was apparently born with Jugge’s involvement in the Bible trade and died with Bonham and Norton’s edition of 1619.44 When it comes to content, it is hard to find a rational basis for the persistence of the “Cheke” label when the Tyndale–Jugge translation gave way to the Bishops’ in the spare sixteenmo editions that Barker donated along with the octavos, but the octavos could claim a feature that was readily apparent and distinctive.45 In his note to the bishops who agreed to undertake the translation for his pet project, Matthew Parker did not prohibit all commentary – and, indeed, larger-format Bishops’ Bibles do have some marginal commentary – but it is true that he instructed that there be no “bitter notis vppon any text, or . . . any determinacion in places of controversie.”46 It would appear from the qualifier at the end that Parker’s aim here was to keep the

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newly reconstituted Protestant church flexible, in line with the Elizabethan Settlement of 1559. This was a politic move. As Parker’s requirement suggests, there were serious controversies over theology and the shape that the English church should take, and these, in line with Protestantism’s commitment to the doctrine of sola scriptura, depended on one’s reading of Scripture. Unity would be difficult to achieve if the Church of England’s official Bible appeared to endorse one strongly held position over another. So, complete Bibles containing the Bishops’ translation have relatively tight-lipped margins, though “the Calvinist orthodoxy of the age” comes through on occasion.47 The successful line of octavos that adopted the Bishops’ text, however, appears to have had fewer scruples. As Maurice Betteridge has observed, “It could well be argued that these notes [i.e., the notes of the black-letter octavos] are frequently more forthright than the Geneva notes.”48 To illustrate this, he reproduces the note on Acts 4:28: Here we do learne that the enemyes of Christ can go no forther, than god [sic] hath appoynted them. Therefore, let the preachers of the truth be of a good comfort thoughe Satan with all the legions of deuylles, the worlde, and all the myghte Prynces thereof, do aryse and conspyre agaynst them, yet they canne do no more then the Lordes hande and counsel hath appoynted before.49

On the one hand, this note offers a message of comfort in God’s omnipotence and justice. On the other, however, it associates “myghte Prynces” with Satan and his “legions of deuylles” as (potential) enemies of the true church. It is not clear that something like this would have pleased James I, who famously objected to the Geneva notes’ “daungerous, and trayterous conceites.”50 Of course, however, the Cheke note for Matthew 17 says that, despite Christ’s gift of freedom, we should “be obediente vnto Magistrates.”51 More typical are notes that are consistent with the paratexts, especially those in the Barker editions, where the emphasis is on soteriology: Christ will save you if you truly believe.52 Others affirm basic Protestant tenets and convey points of doctrine clearly and concisely. There are notes, for example, that reject “corporall presence” in the Eucharist and good works as a condition of salvation.53 There is also boilerplate anti-Catholicism. In 1 Corinthians 1, a note tells readers that Christ alone is lord and that to give others authority in religion is to “brynge agayne the hypochriticall sectes of Fryers and Monkes.”54 And, in Revelation 17, the beast upon which the Whore of Babylon rides is identified as “the papall seate.” The abominations in her cup are the “popes decrees, decretalles, bulles,

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dispensations, suspentions, and cursynges.”55 This is in line with what we find in the later Geneva glosses and in contemporary commentaries such as John Bale’s The Image of Both Churches. Perhaps more noteworthy is what could be read as an affirmation of double predestination. In these New Testaments, the only note for Ephesians 1:5 gives the positive side: “This is the true understandynge of predestination, that without any merytes or deseruynges of oures, yea afore the foundations of the worlde were layed, God hath decreed with hym self to saue through christ all them that do beleue.”56 Later, at Hebrews 6:6, the fire and brimstone come out in part of a long note: Yf any therfore fall away from Chryst, it is a playne token, that they were discemblynge hypocrytes, and that they neuer beleued trulye as Iudas, Symon Magus, Demas, Himeneus, and Philecus were, whiche all fell away from the knowen veritie, and made a mock of Christ . . . They that are suche, can in no wyse be renewed by repentaunce, For they are not of the number of the elect, as Saynt Iohn doth saye: They went from vs, but they were not of vs, for yf they had bene of vs, they woulde haue remayned wyth vs vnto the ende. Yf suche men do repent, theyr repentaunce is as Iudas and Cayns repentaunce was.57

The 1560 Geneva Bible includes a comment on Ephesians 1:4 that briefly gestures at double predestination when it mentions Judas as someone who appeared to be elect but changed. In this way it has a negative edge that we do not see in the Cheke New Testament’s note on that verse, but the Geneva gloss for Hebrew 6:6 pales in comparison to what we find in its predecessor: “They which are apostats, & sinne against ye holy Gost, hate Christ, crucifie and mocke him, but to their own destruction, & therefore fall into desperation, & can not repent.”58 Here, in the Geneva, apostates find themselves damned because their own desperation keeps them from repenting. This desperation is caused by their bad behavior, not because their lack of election – their reprobation – simply makes genuine repentance impossible, as in the Cheke note. The Cheke note on Hebrews 10 discussing those who “synne wyllynglye” is also harsh. Because these people “abide styll obstynately in their wyckednes, and synnes,” “a most horrible and dreadefull iudgment” awaits them.59 It may be that these older notes manage to stay clear of the controversies that would have concerned Parker when he commissioned the Bishops’ translation, but they certainly do not hesitate to present readers with a “bitter” and punitive God.

Conclusion The notes and paratexts of the Cheke New Testaments demand more research to establish their pedigree and doctrinal character more fully, but

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their general clarity and paternalism supports a reading of the wildly popular books as designed for the everyday Protestant whose experience of faith was structured by and around church attendance. That it was this type of New Testament that proved most attractive to the largest number of book buyers in Shakespeare’s England may be unsurprising, but it should be better remembered. As iterations of biblical translations, the black-letter octavos are not especially remarkable, but as books they ask us to reconsider the centrality of translation to the experience of Bible reading. Of course, it matters what specific reading of a verse a vernacular reader encountered, but paratexts could shape one’s sense of content and doctrine just as much as – or perhaps even more than – the actual language of Scripture, and the shape of the market for Bibles and New Testaments calls into question the unchecked claim that most readers were attuned to or especially interested in the nuances of humanist philology. Translations could be – and often were – packaged in substantially different ways, so blindly counting all editions of a given translation as evidence of reception is likely to be misleading: the books “commonlie” associated with Cheke are meaningfully distinct from earlier Tyndale New Testaments and other Bishops’ Bibles. I want also to emphasize an even more fundamental point: the common practice of counting by translation is predicated on an a priori commitment to the idea that translation is what drove reception, and that commitment may not be justifiable in light of the bibliographical record that survives. Jugge’s reason for replacing the revision of Tyndale with the official Bishops’ text probably came down to his relationship with Parker, but it might be argued that moving to the Bishops’ was in line with the series’ existing emphasis on church life. The idea that this correspondence of text and paratext was intended or that it registered with readers, however, is challenged by the fact that the successful blackletter Geneva quartos were usually bound with the Book of Common Prayer and Sternhold–Hopkins metrical psalters. Having an “unofficial” translation was apparently not an impediment to an emphasis on Church of England worship. Moreover, as mentioned earlier, the title-page language of the Cheke New Testaments never changed when Jugge switched translations. Whereas their text was always “Faythfully translated out of the Greke,” the Bishops’ quartos that Jugge published alongside them told readers that the “olde and newe Testament” were “Set foorth by aucthoritie.”60 At no point in the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries is there evidence that they lost their identity as “master Cheekes translation.”

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From the language of his plays, we know that Shakespeare himself drew upon readings from both the Geneva and the Bishops’ translations.61 What exactly this means for how we should understand his art is hard to say, and I am afraid that the argument of this chapter does not make it easier. To render David Kastan’s recent insight that “bibles for most people were merely bibles” more precise, the reality appears to have been that translations for most people were merely translations, not something worth worrying very much about.62 Instead, it turns out that it was the Bibles and New Testaments themselves that mattered. It was the particular books, like the Cheke volumes, that readers had in their hands. Format and paratext were key, but the paradox is that the same evidence that shifts our focus from translation to interpretive aids such as notes means that we usually cannot identify what specific Bible or New Testament version someone consulted by identifying translation alone. According to Naseeb Shaheen, most of the passages where Shakespeare draws on readings that are unique to the Bishops’ translation are ones that allude to the New Testament. Was Shakespeare working from a Bishops’ quarto on these occasions, as Shaheen hazards, or might he have had a Cheke New Testament at hand?63 If the latter, England’s most famous playwright was in at least one sense utterly typical. To see this, however, we need to use the methods of bibliography and book history to table our own assumptions and categories. Doing so enables us to reconstruct those of Shakespeare himself, and of early modern readers more generally.

ii

Stagings: Reformation Reading Practices in the Theater

chapter 3

John 6, Measure for Measure, and the Complexities of the Literal Sense Jay Zysk

This chapter addresses the importance of biblical allusion and Eucharistic controversy to the political, religious, and hermeneutic conflicts staged in William Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure (1604). Though the play’s title famously alludes to Matthew 7:2 (“With what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again”), a subtler biblical allusion to John 6 (“Whoever eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood”) helps us investigate tensions between literal and figurative interpretation that organize the play’s attitudes toward law, order, and justice. This biblical reference occurs in Act 2, where Angelo introduces a startling image of chewing God’s name: Heaven hath my empty words, Whilst my invention, hearing not my tongue, Anchors on Isabel. Heaven in my mouth, As if I did but only chew his name, And in my heart the strong and swelling evil Of my conception.1

Angelo emerges here as a divided reader. Initially characterized by Duke Vincentio as a “man of stricture and firm abstinence” (1.3.12), Angelo is known for his unwavering commitment to a strictly literal interpretation of Vienna’s laws against fornication. Yet Angelo soon twists the law to serve his own desires, proposing that the very laws by which he sentences Claudio to die could be relaxed were Isabella to exchange sex for her brother’s pardon. In admitting such hermeneutic flexibility, Angelo shows that the law’s literal sense is not as absolute as he once claimed. At this moment, Angelo’s aggressive literalism buckles beneath the pressure of his lust. Though he directs his prayers heavenward, Angelo admits that his heart smacks of the “strong and swelling evil” of his “conception.” And he relates this admission through the curious image of masticating God. However peculiar it is to modern audiences, Angelo’s reference to chewing God’s name (which is not included in Shakespeare’s principal 51

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source, George Whetstone’s Promos and Cassandra [1578]) taps into one of the most prominent and popularized interpretive debates in Reformation England: the controversy over the Eucharist.2 More specifically, the images of having “heaven in my mouth” and “chew[ing] his name” resound of John 6, where Christ says, “I am the bread of life . . . Whoever eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood dwelleth in me and I in him.”3 This nettling passage was a touchstone of theological and hermeneutic disputes across the Reformation. Catholics held that Christ entered the mouth as true God and true man at the level of substance. Reformers, by contrast, asserted that God could be in the mouth only figuratively, and different confessional strands (i.e., Church of England, Lutheran, Calvinist, Zwinglian) advanced different ideas about what “figure” could mean in a Eucharistic context. While much scholarship on the Eucharist in the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries tends to emphasize ideas about Christ’s real presence as markers of confessional and political difference, these studies do not elaborate on the crucial connection between sacramental theology and biblical hermeneutics on which Eucharistic controversy rests.4 Moreover, though criticism of Measure for Measure focuses on religious issues ranging from Puritanism to political theology, it does not consider how the Eucharistic debates introduce key questions about literal and figurative interpretation – questions that are pertinent to understanding Angelo’s relationship to the text of the law in Shakespeare’s play.5 Only G. K. Hunter raises the possibility that Angelo’s speech “sounds like a reference to the Eucharist even today; and if so today, how much more in a period . . . ringing with echoes of the Eucharistic controversy.”6 However accurate Hunter’s gloss (now five decades old), Shakespeare does more than capture the tenor of theological debate or reproduce its themes; he seizes on the cultural pressures of sacramental and biblical hermeneutics to dramatize difficult interpretive crises centered on the application of secular laws. Thomas Fulton has argued that the hermeneutic crises in Measure for Measure unfold “on a profoundly scriptural level” and its biblical allusions “converge on the issue of how to balance justice and mercy in both temporal and divine applications.”7 The present chapter builds on Fulton’s compelling discussion of Romans 9 and 11 to discuss how the Eucharist, particularly in the context of Reformation-era commentaries on John 6, provides a historically relevant paradigm with which to think about the interpretive problems posed by Angelo’s insistence on the literal sense of the law. Angelo’s reference to chewing God’s name situates Shakespeare’s early modern audience within the divisive terrain of

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Eucharistic controversy, which underscores the potency of the very moment in the play at which Angelo reveals his hypocrisy and exposes the gaps in his arguments about literal interpretation. This chapter tackles the hermeneutic issues at the heart of Measure for Measure in two sections. The first examines sixteenth-century debates over John 6 in the Reformation. Though these debates predate Measure for Measure, and though Shakespeare may not have read them directly, they no less shape the “thick biblical culture” (to borrow Hannibal Hamlin’s phrase) in which the play was written and performed.8 The concerns raised by Thomas More and George Joye in the 1530s, for example, inform the interpretive debates recorded in English Bibles, where glosses and annotations sparked theological disagreement and polemical response well into the seventeenth century. The chapter’s second section brings the fraught hermeneutic positions that emerge in the disputes over John 6 to bear on related tensions between literal and figurative reading in Measure for Measure. At the heart of both discourses – one theological, the other theatrical – lie consequential questions about how to interpret texts. What is more, both the debates over Scripture reading and the Shakespearean problem comedy prove that the literal sense is neither transparent nor clear-cut. To the contrary, the relationship between literal and figurative is far more complex, if not contentious, than it appears.

The Eucharist and the Literal Sense in Reformation England What did it mean to chew God’s name in Reformation England? Such a question strikes to the core of Eucharistic controversy, and even more directly to a contentious passage in John 6, which prompted some of the most extensive exegetical activity in the sixteenth century. The debates over John 6 show that theological arguments concerning Christ’s presence in the Eucharist (from transubstantiation to memorialism) were predicated on contrasting interpretations of scriptural and patristic texts. Participants challenged their opponents not only on matters of doctrine but also on matters of reading (or misreading) the Bible and the church fathers. Though these debates focus on rather esoteric theological and exegetical issues, in the Reformation they were widely accessible through the medium of print. The printing press made it possible to circulate arguments over scriptural interpretation not only in printed treatises, pamphlets, and sermons but also in English Bibles, which were rich with commentary on the matter. Because such disputes were recorded, printed, and read in the

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vernacular, their critical impact extended beyond the domain of trained theological scholars in the early sixteenth century. Before turning to such arguments in detail, we should begin with the text of John 6, which itself records a volatile interpretive conflict generated by Christ’s invitation to eat his flesh and drink his blood. The relevant passage, as printed in the 1578 Geneva Bible, reads: And Jesus said unto them, I am the bread of life: he that cometh to me, shal not hunger, and he that beleeveth in mee shal never thirst . . . Then Jesus said unto them, Verely, verely I say unto you, Except ye eat the flesh of the Sonne of man, and drinke his bloud, yee have no life in you. Whosoever eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, hath eternall life, and I will rayse him up at the last day. For my flesh is meate in deede, and my bloud is drinke in deede. He that eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, dwelleth in me and I in him. (6:35, 53–6)9

When Christ refers to eating his flesh and drinking his blood, is he speaking literally or figuratively? Must the literal sense of Christ’s words correspond to a literal act of eating whereby Christ’s flesh and blood are received and chewed in the mouth? Or does the literal sense of John 6 – that is, the plain sense of the biblical text – point toward a spiritual reception dependent on metaphor and metonymy, however paradoxical that may seem? So astonishing are Christ’s claims here that they provoke such hard questions, and the passage in John 6 itself records a range of interpretive responses. Some of Christ’s disciples disapprovingly “murmured at him, because he said, I am the bread, which is come downe from heaven” (6:41). Others asked, incredulous or bewildered, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” (6:52). Still others, perhaps appalled or revolted, retreated completely: “From that time, many of his disciples went back, and walked no more with him” (6:66). Christ’s reference to eating his flesh and drinking his blood, it turns out, stirred up as much controversy for the disciples as it did for Reformation readers. Christ’s invitation to eat his flesh and drink his blood ignites a long debate over Eucharistic theology that was, in the gospel account as well as its exegesis, also a debate over hermeneutics. With the exception of the Last Supper, no scriptural text incites the kind of debate over literal and figurative reading (or eating) as does John 6. This scriptural text is cited in nearly every major Eucharistic controversy in the English Reformation, including the aforementioned dispute between More and Joye in the 1530s, the exchanges between Thomas Cranmer and Stephen Gardiner in the 1550s, and the disputations between John Jewel and Thomas Harding in the 1560s. These debates are wide ranging in their theological, political, and

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ecclesiological consequences. Most relevant to the concerns of this chapter, however, is the basic point that the terms “literal” and “figurative” do not operate within the context of Reformation hermeneutics as they do for a modern reader. When it comes to the specific context of biblical interpretation, the term “literal,” as Fulton reminds us, must be understood as more loaded and more complex than “the simple absence of the figurative.”10 Moreover, claims about the literal sense of Scripture must be situated in a long history that reaches back into medieval exegesis. As Beryl Smalley and Henri de Lubac (among many others) have shown, medieval theories of Bible reading admit figurative readings as part of the literal sense of Scripture.11 If medieval exegetes connect the literal sense to allegorical, anagogical, and tropological interpretations, and see these nonliteral modes of reading as both necessary and valid to comprehending divine mysteries as revealed in the text of Scripture, evangelical readers often rejected the idea that the scriptural text embeds a range of significations. Luther and Tyndale, for example, repeatedly argue that there was only one acceptable interpretation of Scripture, and that was the literal sense: the singular, plain, nonfigurative interpretation in which God’s word is to be understood in the same way across time.12 Despite ostensible evangelical claims for simplicity, the literal sense is frequently shown to be more complex, often admitting the allegories and metaphors it claims to reject. As Brian Cummings explains, “Protestant literalism is nowhere near so literal as it wants to appear. If simple-minded adherents then and now wished for plain and simple meaning, language itself always got in the way.”13 In many cases concerning scriptural and theological matters, it is quite difficult (if not impossible) to divorce literal from figurative. The Eucharist is one critical case. In a revealing essay on William Tyndale and scriptural allegory, James Simpson argues that the Eucharist forces evangelical readers to reconsider their otherwise stringent literalism in order to explain Christ’s presence in the sacrament. In other words, an opposition between Catholics as allegorical readers and reformers as literal readers breaks down in the context of the Eucharist. Simpson effectively deconstructs such an opposition in his reading of Tyndale. Though “promotion of that simple, literal sense required strenuous repudiation of its competitor, allegory,” he claims, Tyndale had no choice but to allow an allegorical interpretation of the Eucharist in order to eschew idolatry.14 Eucharistic eating thus confounds a seemingly clear-cut polemic, for, in Simpson’s estimation, the sacrament is “the place where the fissures of an evangelical hermeneutics become so startlingly visible.”15 Since a literal reception of Christ’s flesh and blood is hard for them to

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countenance, evangelical readers have no alternative except to advance a figurative understanding of Eucharistic presence that stressed the sacrament’s spiritual fruits. Though Simpson does not address John 6 directly, the tensions between literal and the figurative that he locates in Tyndale also play out within a contemporaneous debate over John 6 waged between Thomas More and George Joye in 1533.16 In a short pamphlet, The Souper of the Lorde (1533), Joye advanced a Zwinglian reading of John 6 and, by extension, of the Eucharistic sacrament. In response, More rejected Joye’s allegorical reading in Answer to a Poisoned Book (1533), which stands as one of the most extensive commentaries on John 6 printed in the sixteenth century. While the More–Joye debate witnesses a clash between different theologies of Christ’s Eucharistic presence, it also unfolds as a contest over scriptural hermeneutics, particularly competing claims about the literal sense.17 The terms of such a debate are complex, and the conclusions illustrate the divisive politics that drive theological and hermeneutic debate in the Reformation. The exchange between More and Joye appears at first glance to divide neatly between allegorical and literal reading, yet both More and Joye complicate these polarities. In Answer to a Poisoned Book, the Catholic More allows for allegory in keeping with the conventions of medieval biblical exegesis, but then qualifies his hermeneutic approach, suggesting that allegorical reading alone cannot capture the plain sense of John 6. More finds allegory an acceptable reading practice so long as it is not the only one. By contrast, the evangelical Joye does not reject allegory but embraces it: “Faith in [Christ] is therefore the meat whiche Christe prepareth and dresseth so purely: powldering & spycyng it with spirituall allegoryes . . . to geve us everlasting lyfe thorow it.”18 For Joye, the plain sense of John 6 must be understood spiritually, in a dominantly allegorical sense. These two positions illustrate the kind of about-face that Simpson locates in his assessment of Tyndale. By resisting allegory, is More advocating an evangelical biblical literalism? Conversely, by suggesting that “spirituall allegoryes” are necessary to understand the plain sense of John 6, is Joye wavering from his own commitment to the literal sense?19 Such a reversal of positions, by which More qualifies the allegorical reading that Joye supports, illustrates how the opposition between “literal” and “figurative” breaks down in these debates. This reversal is more striking still for its partisan politics. What is paramount here is not so much whether More rejects allegory or Joye adopts it, but rather the lengths to which each goes to discredit his opponent’s reading practice.

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In fact, both More and Joye offer capacious and quite nuanced arguments for both allegorical and literal reading in the context of John 6, and yet, to gain polemical traction, they willfully misrepresent each other’s positions. When Joye defends allegory in his interpretation of John 6, for example, More seizes on this argument and reduces Joye to an allegorist. More’s reductive stance is a political strategy, for once he persuades his readers that Joye reads allegorically, More can then characterize his own interpretation as more subtle, allowing for allegory but limiting its authority: “The questyon is not whither those wordes may be well veryfyed & expowned of spirituall eatyng by way of an allegory/ but whyther it may bysyde al that, be truly expowned of the veryly bodyly eatyng of Chrystes blessed body in dede.”20 More presents Joye’s allegory as discounting the “verily bodyly eatyng” – that is, the presence of Christ in substance – in the Eucharist. Joye volleys back a similarly reductive characterization that assails “the literall sence of More.” Just as More brands Joye an allegorist, Joye brands More a literalist, urging his readers, “Thou shalt se it playne that [Christ’s] wordis be understanded spiritually of the beleyfe in hys fleshe crucyfyed and his blood shede.”21 Joye aligns More’s literal sense with a form of literal physical eating – that is, the carnal reception of flesh and blood – that More himself did not advocate. Having cast Joye’s reading practices as merely allegorical, More proceeds to argue that in John 6, Christ answered his skeptics “with no sophisms but with a very playn open tale.”22 Were Christ to explicate his own words in John 6, More argues, Christ would have said, “This will I tell you, neyther in tropis, allegories, nor parables, but evyn for a very playne trouthe, that eate ye shall my very flesh in dede, yf every purpose to be saved, ye, and drynke my very bloude to[o].”23 Moreover, by characterizing Christ himself as one who eschews allegories, tropes, and parables, More dismantles Joye’s allegorical reading by placing it at odds with the plain sense of Christ’s own words, which are nonfigurative and (at least as More would have it) support the doctrine of transubstantiation. More claims that his opponent, “by cause of some allegories, turne[s] all the playn wordes from the first right understanding into a secondary sense of allegories.”24 More thus accuses Joye of perverting the literal sense by subordinating “the first right understanding” of Christ’s words to a “secondary” allegorical interpretation. While the terms of the More–Joye debate are ubiquitous in polemical tracts and pamphlets, they also play out on the pages of English Bibles, particularly in marginal glosses and biblical commentaries. As James Kearney argues, “The history of the Bible in early modern England . . . does not

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document a Church united by a standard text, but a divided Church inundated with multiple translations and editions of Scripture with various and conflicting agendas.”25 It is unsurprising that the Rheims New Testament (1582), a vernacular translation of the Latin Vulgate, interpreted John 6 in the context of Catholic orthodoxy. By contrast, Protestant Bibles, such as the Great Bible (1539–40), the Geneva Bible (1557), and the Bishops’ Bible (1568), presented Christ’s words in the context of spiritual reception as set forth in the Church of England’s Eucharistic theology. In what remains of this section, I examine three iterations of such commentary in English Bibles – William Fulke’s “confutations” to the Rheims New Testament, the Rheims commentary itself, and the Geneva Bible’s marginalia – in order to show that John 6 emerges as a crucial site of hermeneutic debate, particularly over literal and figurative reading. Fulke, a Protestant scholar, published a parallel-text edition of the Rheims New Testament (first printed in 1589 and revised in 1601, 1618, and 1633), which contained a series of confutations to earlier Catholic commentaries. Fulke’s confutations show that different theological positions are predicated on different kinds of biblical hermeneutics, a point evident in his commentary on John 6, a passage that proved as robust for him as it did for More and Joye in the 1530s. Fulke’s basic question about John 6 is a question about interpretation: “Wherein standeth the figure? In the wordes Flesh and bloud, or in the wordes Eating and drinking?”26 There is a difference, Fulke suggests, between Christ’s physical flesh and blood and the mode of its Eucharistic reception. He writes, “The whole question is of the maner of eating and drinking which is either literall and without figure (as the Papists take it) receiving it in the mouth and the bodie, or els spiritual and figurative (as S. Augustine there teacheth it).”27 For Fulke, the two contrasting positions could not be clearer. Fulke grounds his figurative, spiritualist interpretation on the patristic authority of Augustine, who was cited in support of both Catholic and reformed Eucharistic theologies. To have heaven in one’s mouth spiritually, Fulke claims, is decidedly not to chew God’s body or his name literally. He thus rejects a form of Eucharistic reception that is “literall and without figure” and advances this spiritualist interpretation as itself the plain sense of John 6. One receives the true sacramental presence of Christ without literally eating flesh and drinking blood. In developing his argument, Fulke not only takes aim at the doctrine of transubstantiation, but also calls the reading practices evidenced by the Rheims commentary into question. The Rheims New Testament introduces John 6 with the following headnote: “Many not withstanding do murmur at this doctrine, yea, and become apostates . . . But the Twelve sticke unto him,

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believing that he is God omnipotent as he said.”28 The revolt of the disciples is key to the Rheims argument, for the revolt signals the uniqueness of Christ’s words as a departure from otherwise conventional figures of speech. The gloss reads, “It was not a figure or a mystery of bare bread or wine, nor any Metaphoricall or Allegoricall speech that could make a troupe of his Disciples revolte at once.”29 In other words, if the disciples were so accustomed to Christ speaking in parables, tropes, and allegories, why would another such figure cause a disturbance? The Rheims commentary concludes that in order to stir up such revolt, Christ’s words must have been spoken nonfiguratively, rendering Christ’s invitation to eat his flesh and drink his blood a speech-act of an entirely new order. The Rheims New Testament makes such an argument in order to defend the doctrine of transubstantiation. At the outset of John 6, Christ grants the disciples’ request for ordinary food by feeding them with five loaves and two fish (6:1–21), an episode that sets the stage for his selfcharacterization as the bread of life. Interpreting the temporal food as spiritual sustenance, the Rheims commentary explains that Christ speaks in a distinctly sacramental way: “[Christ] taketh occasion to draw them to the desire of a yet more excellent foode which he had to give them, and so by little to open unto them the great meate and mysterie of the B[lessed] Sacrament.”30 Though the Rheims gloss uses terms such as “B. Sacrament” that are not indigenous to the gospel narrative, it argues strongly that the plain sense of John 6 is Eucharistic and, beyond that, accords with Catholic orthodoxy. This strain of argument continues throughout, as in the note to John 6:48, which explains that Christ’s invitation to eat his flesh and drink his blood points to “The reall presence,” as well as in a marginal note identifying the last section of the chapter (6:52–71) as “The Gospel upon Corpus Christi day.”31 In his dissenting commentary, Fulke turns the terms of the Rheims commentary against themselves. He begins with the same instance – the revolt of the disciples – but analogizes the revolting disciples not to Protestants reading figuratively but to the Catholic readers who align Christ’s words in John 6 with transubstantiation. Such an interpretation, Fulke charges, is erroneous because it is too literal: “The cause of their revolt was for that they understood literally that which hee [Christ] spake of eating and drinking figuratively.”32 In words evocative of the More–Joye debates of the 1530s, Fulke argues that the disciples are horrified because they interpreted Christ’s words incorrectly, taking as literal that which Christ intended as figurative. Their extreme literalism leads them to see Christ’s words in terms of carnal reception – that is, having God in their

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mouths and chewing his body and blood. Fulke elides carnal reception with the physical literalism that he ascribes to transubstantiation. “The Papists,” he says, “have revolted from the Church of Christ and the faith of the ancient Fathers, who understood the words of the institution of the Supper, as these also of the spirituall or heavenly matter of the Supper, to be figurative.”33 For Fulke, the plain sense of John 6 has to be figurative, lest it authorize carnal chewing or cannibalism. Fulke characterizes Catholic readers as facile interpreters guided by a skewed understanding of what is literal and what is figurative. His argument coincides with the commentary in both the Great Bible and the Geneva Bible, which both suggest that in John 6 Christ “reproveth the fleshly hearers of his word” and “the carnall are offended at him.”34 However bracing, Fulke’s argument exhibits the same political strategy used by Joye against More: he reduces transubstantiation to cannibalism, thereby exaggerating (and misreading) the Catholic doctrine as a grossly literal act of physical consumption. Though the Rheims glosses unapologetically situate John 6 in the context of Catholic orthodoxy, it is crucial to recognize that those who defend transubstantiation (ranging from scholastics such as Peter Lombard and Thomas Aquinas to More, Gardiner, and other sixteenth-century proponents of the doctrine) state clearly that the reception of Christ’s body and blood in its human, fleshly form was dangerous and undesirable.35 While transubstantiation insists on Christ’s literal, real presence, it does not allow for carnal reception. The communicant holds heaven in the mouth at the level of substance but does not chew Christ’s physical body in flesh and bone. Fulke overlooks – indeed, overliteralizes – Catholic doctrine in order to pack a polemical punch. The Rheims commentary, which is the target of Fulke’s confutations, itself addresses the dangers of cannibalism and carnal reception in its extended commentary on John 6. In doing so, however, the commentary makes a surprisingly paradoxical turn, one that further destabilizes a strict opposition between literal and figurative. In rejecting a figurative interpretation of the Eucharist, the Rheims commentary nonetheless resorts to figurative language, specifically metaphor, in order to reconcile Christ’s substantial presence in the Eucharist with the sacrament’s spiritual mysteries. Consider this annotation explaining Christ’s self-characterization as “the true bread from heaven” (6:32): Though the person of Christ incarnate, even out of the sacrament also, be meant under the Metaphores of bread and drink from heaven: and our beleefe in him, be signified by eating and feeding; yet the causes why they

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should be recommended to us in such terms were, that he was to be eaten and drunken in dede in the forms of bread and wine.36

There are at least two paradoxes here. First, to grasp the literal sense of the Eucharist one must accommodate the “Metaphores of bread and drink.” The literal and metaphorical are therefore shown to be co-dependent in the Rheims exegesis. Second, though Christ is received sacramentally as bread and wine, one eats his flesh and drinks his blood “in dede” – that is, really and truly. Christ is present in substance, but that presence can be apprehended only through the signs of bread and wine. Thus, the commentary insists on a conjunction of the literal and the figurative: the sacramental reality, which Catholics comprehend as an ontological reality, no less requires metaphorical vehicles to be understood. At the same time, these metaphors do not negate Christ’s literal (as in substantial) presence in the sacrament. Instead, they make Christ’s Eucharistic presence known to the communicant. Such use of biblical commentary to support theological and hermeneutic positions is also displayed in the veritable textual history of the Geneva Bible, which interprets John 6 in line with the Church of England’s Eucharistic theology. The Geneva glosses (from the early editions of 1557 and 1560 forward) trace out key tenets of this theology, including faithful reception, spiritual eating, and an emphasis on Christ’s sacrifice rather than on transubstantiation. These theological tenets accord with those put forth by Thomas Cranmer in his Defence of the Blessed Sacrament of the Altar (1550) and Answer to Gardiner (1551), and are also reflected in the Book of Common Prayer, which was itself reproduced at the beginning of the 1578 edition of the Geneva Bible.37 Cranmer states that Christ’s words in John 6 “are not to be understanded, that we should eate Christe with our teeth grossely & carnally, but that we shall spiritually & g[h]ostly with our faith eate hym.”38 The Geneva commentary echoes Cranmer’s analogical argument. When Christ directs his disciples to “Labour not for the meat which perisheth, but for the meate that endureth unto everlasting life” (6:27), the Geneva gloss defines this food in terms similar to Cranmer’s, as that “which nourisheth & augmenteth our fayth.”39 Moreover, when Christ refers to Himself as the bread of life and issues the startling invitation to eat his flesh and drink his blood (John 6:35), the Geneva gloss reads, “he shall never want spiritual nourishment.”40 That point is echoed in the gloss to John 6:56 (“He that eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, dwelleth in me and I in him”), which picks up on the chiastic structure of Christ’s command

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in instructing the reader, “As our bodies are sustained with meat and drinke: so are our soules nourished with the bodie and blood of Jesus Christ. To eate the flesh of Christ and drinke his blood, is to dwell in Christ, and to have Christ dwelling in us.”41 Thus, the plain sense of John 6, as interpreted by the Geneva marginalia, is that the Eucharist is a distinctly spiritual communion as opposed to the kind of ontological reality asserted by transubstantiation. The marginalia in both the Rheims New Testament and the Geneva Bible thus demonstrate that authorizing a particular sacramental doctrine involves authorizing a particular argument about the literal sense. The contest over how to interpret such a text, in both polemical debate and biblical commentary, presents the conflict between literal and figurative as a conflict about interpretive authority, which is also itself deeply political. This link between the literal sense and political authority extends into a number of secular contexts in Reformation England, including London’s commercial stage. The tensions between literal and figurative reading so vibrantly displayed in the shared context of biblical and sacramental hermeneutics play out in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, particularly in scenes that demonstrate Angelo’s conflicted interpretation of the law. Although the religious and dramatic discourses are markedly different, they both explore the political pitfalls of the literal sense.

The Literal Sense and the Law in Measure for Measure In staging a hermeneutic controversy over the literal sense of the law, Measure for Measure shows that Angelo’s literalism ultimately causes more unrest than do the crimes it claims to correct. The most literal interpreter of the law is also its most blatant offender, which raises a series of important questions. Must the text of the law be read and applied without exception, according to its most literal sense? Or can the law accommodate a balance between justice and mercy, rigor and compassion? Angelo’s allusion to John 6 does not, admittedly, shape Measure for Measure around expressly Eucharistic concerns. But in calling to mind historical conflicts between literal and figurative hermeneutics registered in the Eucharistic debates, the allusion provides a resonant context in which to situate two different models of interpreting the law as embodied by two different political authorities in Shakespeare’s Vienna. Duke Vincentio, on one side, provides for mercy, redemption, and restoration in his administration. When it comes to the laws of fornication, as Lucio says of the duke,

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“he had some feeling of the sport; he knew the service; and that instructed him to mercy” (3.2.115–16). By contrast, Angelo metes out the strictest sentences possible. Though the textual content of the fornication laws is the same under both administrations, Angelo “awakes . . . all the enrolled penalties” (1.2.154), with his firm commitment to the law’s literal sense introducing a reformation of Vincentio’s moral laxity. It is on account of his rigid interpretation of the law that Angelo is variously described as “severe” (2.1.179; 3.1.481, 489), “stern” (2.2.66), and “absolute” (5.1.57). He “follows close the rigour of the statute” (1.4.67) and is on some occasions called “precise” (1.3.50, 3.1.93). J. W. Lever glosses the term “precise” as “strict in morals, puritanical.”42 Angelo’s puritanical zeal is fueled by his hermeneutic stringency, which elicits a secondary meaning of “precise” as “exact” in expression or interpretation.43 Angelo displays such a “precise” literalism when he says of Claudio, “He must die” (2.1.31), and then defends that sentence to Isabella, saying, “It is the law, not I, condemn your brother; / Were he my kinsman, brother, or my son, / It should be thus with him. He must die tomorrow” (2.2.80–2). Whereas the duke allows for multiple senses in which the law can be interpreted based on circumstance, Angelo lands on a singular, unequivocal meaning of crime and punishment that even the bonds of kinship cannot relax. Angelo’s relationship to the literal sense of the law proves paradoxical at best, and as such reflects the Eucharistic polemic discussed earlier. Despite his literalist bent, Angelo manipulates Isabella when he offers Claudio’s pardon in exchange for sex. Tellingly, the literal-minded Angelo describes his sexual desire for Isabella by making recourse to paradox, itself a figure of speech. Angelo stands to “sin in loving virtue” (2.2.183), and though he is not seduced by “the strumpet / With all her double vigour,” he is attracted to the rigor of a “virtuous maid” (2.2.183–5). Such paradoxical expressions, which inflect the literalist’s precision with ambiguity, anticipate Angelo’s allusion to John 6 two scenes later. When Angelo speaks of having “heaven on my mouth,” he suggests that his prayer is inauthentic and ineffective because of his lust. His prayer does not unite him to God in the metonymic sense of Psalm 34 (“I will always give thankes unto the Lord: his praise shalbe in my mouth continually”) but rather in a grossly material sense, “as if I did but only chew his name” (2.4.3–4).44 It is no accident that Angelo equates his profane prayers with carnal eating, which reformers saw as the greatest perversion of the Eucharist as well as the scriptural texts used to defend it. It is equally telling that in limning his hypocrisy in such terms, Angelo himself resorts to figures of speech, which themselves create gaps in his own literalist arguments.

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Isabella recognizes Angelo’s contradictory stance with respect to legal interpretation. Shocked by his proposition, she challenges Angelo not only to reconsider his penal convictions, but also to reform his hermeneutical perspective, namely by foregoing strict literalism in the name of a more lenient measure of justice: isabella Must he needs die? angelo Maiden, no remedy. isabella Yes: I do think that you might pardon him, And neither heaven nor man grieve at the mercy. angelo I will not do’t. isabella But can you if you would? angelo Look what I will not, that I cannot do. isabella But might you do’t, and do the world no wrong If so your heart were touch’d with that remorse As mine is to him? angelo He’s sentenc’d, ’tis too late.

(2.2.48–55)

Against Angelo’s assertion that he “will not” rescind Claudio’s penalty, Isabella declares that he “might” if his vision of justice were to admit mercy. Such a transformation in policy is contingent on the deputy’s interpretive shift to take the perspective of the criminals he sentences – criminals, Isabella reminds Angelo, whose actions are not unknown to him. “How would you be / If He, which is the top of judgement, should / But judge you as you are?” (2.2.75–7), Isabella asks, referring here to Christ’s command, “Judge not, that ye be not judged” in Matthew 7 – the same passage from which the play gets its title. “Oh think on that,” she concludes, “And mercy then will breathe within your lips, / Like man new made” (2.2.77–9). Isabella’s call for a merciful interpretation of the law reminds Shakespeare’s audience of the fact that mercy was considered a plausible legal alternative to absolute justice in early modern England. While Vincentio appoints Angelo to secure Vienna’s “strict statues and most biting laws” that “for this fourteen years we have let slip” (1.3.19–21), the duke also reminds his deputy that a ruler can forego the law’s literal sense if mercy would secure a better form of justice. “Your scope is as mine own,” says Vincentio, “So to enforce or qualify the laws / As to your soul seems good” (1.1.64–6). Vincentio does not authorize a literalist position here but suggests instead that the law can be tempered according to the ruler’s prerogative. Such a provision recalls the importance of equity to Elizabethan and Jacobean political discourse. As Debora Shuger has shown, the king could appeal to administrative bodies such as the Star

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Chamber (on civil matters) and the chancery courts (on ecclesiastical matters) for lighter sentences. “Sovereign and sacral is he,” Shuger writes, “who decides the exceptions: who has the discretionary authority in such cases to use mercy, to provide equitable relief, to qualify his law as to his soul seems good.”45 Built into the very protocols of judicial governance, then, was the king’s capacity to interpret the law less literally. Though Duke Vincentio reminds Angelo of such a provision, Angelo rejects it. Determined not to “make a scarecrow of the law” (2.1.1), Angelo asserts the literal sense. “To be received plain,” he explains to Isabella in equally plain syntax, “Your brother is to die” (2.4.82–3). As we saw in the sixteenth-century context of biblical hermeneutics, the argument for a strictly literal (or “plain”) sense of interpretation encodes the very paradoxes and ambiguities it endeavors to suppress. Rather than bend the law for Claudio’s pardon, which lies within his power to do, Angelo excepts himself from the laws against fornication when he bribes Isabella with sex in exchange for Claudio’s release. “Might there not be a charity in sin / To save this brother’s life?” (2.4.63–4), he asks Isabella. Angelo, who says that he can “speak / Against the thing I say” (2.4.59–60), equivocates by casting sex as “charity.” Suddenly the law that was previously immune to modification now avails itself to a new figuration, one that distorts a foundational term within Christian ethics. Angelo’s willingness to manipulate the law for his own ends shapes what Isabella calls his “devilish mercy” (3.1.64). Angelo’s hypocrisy, encoded in yet another paradox, illustrates the danger brought on by his uncompromising rigor. As Sarah Beckwith argues, “The too severe attempt to reform sexual practices can lead to disunity and a breaking of the peace that was supposed to be the object of reform in the first place.”46 Angelo’s focus on a single aspect of the law (fornication) to the exclusion of everything else is equally dangerous. As Peter Lake argues, Angelo exhibits “a mistaken valuation of the sins of concupiscence as opposed to those of aversion, a narrow definition of virtue, order and reputation in terms of chastity and sexual honour that, when pursued with too much zeal, could only lead to social disunity and conflict.”47 Angelo’s literalism breaks down not only because it leads to the mistreatment of Claudio and Isabella, but also because Angelo speaks against the thing he says in appropriating the law for his own depraved purpose. The tension between literal and figurative reading evident in Angelo’s relationship to the fornication laws gains intensity in the play’s final scenes, where Duke Vincentio returns to Vienna and ultimately repossesses his political jurisdiction. The duke, in Harry Berger, Jr.’s estimation, “works

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behind the back and from behind the arras – voyeuristically, duplicitously, furtively, maliciously” to save Claudio from death and restore Vienna to a more merciful code of justice.48 In making repeated recourse to metatheatrical devices, moreover, Duke Vincentio draws on explicitly figurative means – namely, his own disguise as a friar; the bed trick involving Mariana, Isabella, and Angelo; and the proposed substitution of Barnardine’s head (and, when Barnardine does not comply, Ragozine’s) for Claudio’s head – to undercut both the severity and the hypocrisy of Angelo’s extreme literalism. In one of the play’s brilliant ironies, moreover, Vincentio mobilizes these theatrical vehicles to reduce Angelo to his most literal and basic governmental function: a deputy, whose temporary authority is decidedly different from the authority enjoyed by a duke. In the final act of the play, the fanatical literalist is derogated to nothing more than a “substitute” (5.1.136, 142), to no more than “man, proud man, / Dressed in a little brief authority” (2.2.118–20). Here the literal sense redounds negatively to Angelo, whose zealous moralism is undercut by the plain, basic fact that his authority is only ever transitory. Duke Vincentio further extends the theatrical metaphor to condemn Angelo as a false figure of virtue, a devil in angel’s clothes: “O, what may man within him hide, / Though angel on the outward side!” (3.2. 264–5). By appealing to the figural device of the actor’s costume (not to mention the familiar allegorical figures from the morality play tradition), Duke Vincentio reminds the audience that Angelo is, literally speaking, simply a figurehead. At the play’s outset the duke asks, “What figure of us, think you, he will bear?” (1.1.16), by which he frames Angelo’s position in terms of a substitute who assumes the role of duke only temporarily. Though the duke uses figurative devices to correct the abuse of power by his deputy Angelo, the play does not replace one mode of interpretation with another, but rather (as we saw in the debates over John 6) deepens the conflict between literalism and figuralism and makes that conflict part of the play’s conclusion. The bed trick scene offers one such example of how Shakespeare interleaves these interpretive strategies. In orchestrating this scheme, Duke Vincentio (still disguised as a friar) not only helps Isabella gain pardon for Claudio but also enables Mariana to consummate her marriage to Angelo. The duke uses figurative devices to trick Angelo into upholding the literal sense of his initial “pre-contract” (4.1.72) with Mariana, from which he has fled. The bed trick brilliantly transforms this contract, initially created in futuro rather in presenti, into a legal bond from which Angelo can no longer escape. By means of the metatheatrical trick, the marriage contract becomes literally (and lawfully) valid.

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The collision between literal and figurative reading strategies is even more satisfying when, in the final act, Duke Vincentio ostensibly defends the law’s literal sense in setting down Angelo’s sentence. In an apparent reversal of his commitment to mercy, the duke proclaims: But as he adjudg’d your brother, Being criminal in double violation Of sacred chastity and of promise-breach Thereon dependent, for your brother’s life, The very mercy of the law cries out Most audible, even from his proper tongue: “An Angelo for Claudio; death for death. Haste still pays haste, and leisure answers leisure; Like doth quit like, and Measure still for Measure.” Then, Angelo, thy fault’s thus manifested Which, though thou wouldst deny, denies thee vantage. We do condemn thee to the very block Where Claudio stooped to death, and with like haste. (5.1.401–14) Away with him.

Here the duke, otherwise known for his leniency, apparently shifts his conventional hermeneutic position by imposing the law’s harshest penalty on Angelo. Fulton is right to suggest that “something is wrong with the way the Bible is used” when the duke refers to Matthew 7, for the duke “reverses the law of mercy even as he invokes it.”49 But the duke’s surprising reversal is itself the point, especially if one reads the duke as feigning a commitment to literalism as part of an overall strategy to bring Angelo to justice. Claudio is still alive, and the duke does not ultimately send Angelo to death. Especially when read as part of the “artificial choreography of the last act,” to borrow Lake’s phrase, the duke reads the letter of the law less than literally: first he pardons the criminal Barnardine (5.1.486–8) and then he extends mercy to Angelo (5.1.495).50 Thus, while Vincentio initially ventriloquizes Angelo’s legal precision for the express purpose of dismantling it, he eventually corrects Angelo’s precision by appealing to mercy and restoring justice through any number of figurative tricks and devices. By emphasizing the figurative machinations of drama itself in bringing about the final measure of justice, Duke Vincentio reminds us that Measure for Measure as a whole rehearses a fraught debate over the interpretation of texts. Within the play, as within contemporary theological polemic, the literal sense is a complex matter, not least because it cannot always be disentangled from the figuralism it claims to reject. As suggested in this chapter’s opening, Shakespeare introduces this question, in part, through

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a biblical allusion to John 6, which recalls the loaded hermeneutic contexts of Eucharistic controversy in the sixteenth century – a controversy that was publicly available and even encountered when reading the Bible, as we saw earlier. In alluding to the deeply divisive hermeneutic history of John 6, Shakespeare not only calls attention to the interpretive debates available to his audience, but also introduces the ominous associations of these controversies. The question of literal and figurative interpretation was not just disseminated in biblical, theological, and theatrical contexts as a matter of intellectual curiosity; the question had profound ramifications and consequences, including death. What is more, since the very concept of a “dominant” Eucharistic theology changed across the various phases of the Henrician, Edwardian, Marian, and Elizabethan eras, the literal sense of the sacrament was itself hard to fix, and this theological flux could itself become a source of unpredictability. As in Reformation controversies over the Eucharist, so too in Shakespeare’s Vienna: in Measure for Measure, Claudio stands to die on account of Angelo’s rigidly literal interpretation of the law, while he is allowed to live under the duke’s more merciful jurisdiction. The interpretive uncertainty, and the potential for dire consequences resulting from this paradoxical, shifting relationship of the literal and the figurative, underscore the drama with very real anxiety as the characters wander into hermeneutic disputes that echo the perilous controversies over Eucharistic theology and Scripture reading in Reformation England.

chapter 4

Words of Diverse Significations: Hamlet’s Puns, Amphibology, and Allegorical Hermeneutics Kristen Poole

Hamlet walks on stage, and begins to speak in puns. His first three lines of the play are short retorts to Claudius: (“A little more than kin, and less than kind”; “Not so much, my lord, I am too much in the ‘son’”); and to his mother: (“Ay, madam, it is common.”)1 Punning is a habit of speech that marks him as sardonic and bitter, his fury at the family situation seeping out in this string of double entendres. “Kind” means both a species and the care of others; Hamlet uses the word to signal a fraught sense of familial belonging, and a critique of his uncle’s lack of kindness. The pun on sun/ son calls attention to Hamlet’s rightful place as his father’s heir, and resentment at his displacement. “Common” takes up Gertrude’s word from her line “Thou knowst ’tis common all that lives must die” (1.2.72), and spins it away from her meaning of “a human universal” to indicate that her remarriage is commonplace and lower-class, with a biting insinuation of sexual promiscuity. The tonality of these remarks can be recouped for a modern audience by emphasizing their overt sarcasm and disrespect, as in the brilliant Royal Shakespeare Company performance of David Tennant.2 But Hamlet’s habit of punning has also been a cause for modern embarrassment. While Hamlet has come to serve as a popular synecdoche for literature’s ability to plumb the depths of the soul – the image of Hamlet looking into the hollowed eyes of a skull is iconic of art’s philosophical questioning of the self – he speaks in a form long considered low and crude. As Jonathan Culler colorfully puts it, “tradition has thought the pun an excrescence of literature, an obnoxious obtrusion from the source of genius, or a rhetorical device of questionable taste.”3 Although this aesthetic distaste was present from the emergence of “pun” as a derogatory term in the 1640s,4 the rejection of punning was especially prominent among the Victorians. In his 1885 edition of Hamlet, George MacDonald registers his one reservation about Shakespeare’s art: “the idea of over-condensation with its tendency to seeming confusion – the only fault I know in the Poet – [is] 69

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a grand fault, peculiarly his own, born of the beating of his wings against the impossible. It is much as if, able to think two thoughts at once, he would compel his phrase to utter them at once.”5 The concept that two ideas can be forced into one phrase, or even one word, belies a notion of stylistic and intellectual elegance that depends upon a clear, unequivocal relationship of signified and signifier. MacDonald’s evident distaste for this type of linguistic “overcondensation” was not unique, but typical of an aesthetic and hermeneutic that refuted polysemy. In his 1885 Bampton lectures, which would become his influential History of Interpretation (1886), Frederic W. Farrar was hardly coy in expressing his harsh opinion of the allegorical interpretation of the Bible, which made its way into early Christianity from the ancient Jewish scholar Philo. Writing of “[t]he complete perversion of Scripture which results from Philo’s method,” Farrar propounds that “the history of Israel lost all its beauty and all its interest when it was turned into didactic allegory and poetic mist.”6 Farrar’s disdainful description of allegory as “poetic mist” (like MacDonald’s pointed reference to “the Poet”) signals an inherent disdain of multivalent linguistic structures. Brian Cummings has reflected on how Victorian prejudices against allegory continue to shape scholarly attitudes, noting that “an anti-allegorical sentiment has relied on what might appear now . . . a very narrow and reductive division between intellectual epochs, between medieval obscurantism and Renaissance clarity. Such a sentiment nonetheless influences many present-day accounts of the origins of protestant theology, however well submerged or endowed with scholarly or philosophical sophistication.”7 Traditional critical revulsion against puns (in literary studies) and allegory (in biblical hermeneutics) thus share an inherited aversion to “[o]ver-condensation with its tendency to seeming confusion,” the presumed confusion resulting from having “to think two thoughts at once” forcibly “compelled” into one phrase or word. This shared resistance effectively registers the similarities of puns and allegorical structures. Indeed, Maureen Quilligan observes that in “the complicated patterns of interconnected meaning which spread like a web across their horizontal surfaces . . . we may easily sense the essential affinity of allegory to the pivotal phenomenon of the pun.”8 If we consider puns and allegory as structurally interconnected forms, it makes sense that their cultural and critical stock would rise and fall together. And indeed, as much as Victorian scholars expressed revulsion for both puns and allegory, Elizabethan writers valorized these two forms. As Paul J. Voss has shown, puns were especially popular in the latter part of the century, reaching their aesthetic peak in the 1590s.9 The pun was part of

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a widespread culture of rampant literary experimentation, responding (as Magdalena Adamczyk argues) to a particularly generative moment in the development of the English language.10 The inherited negative connotations of “pun” mask the elevated status of such wordplay in the decades around 1600; Sophie Read demonstrates how, for sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century readers and authors, those verbal plays that we group together and label as “puns” were distinguished and identified by classical rhetorical figures (such as syllepsis, antanaclasis, paronomasia).11 And if puns for us are a form of low humor, for Shakespeare’s audience they held profound linguistic (and philosophical, and even theological) import – a word’s compression of “two thoughts at once” highlighted the mysterious, troubling, or thrilling capacities of language, and the continuous demand of hermeneutical action for listeners and readers. In the realm of late sixteenth-century literature, the draw of what we have come to call puns, and the profound degree to which they work in larger allegorical structures, is best illustrated by Edmund Spenser’s kaleidoscopic Faerie Queene. Spenser’s poem itself speaks to the vibrancy of Elizabethan literary allegories. This period was simultaneously marked by the widespread dissemination and popularization of hermeneutical writings (as discussed in this volume’s Introduction), and at first glance Protestant sermons and treatises might seem adversarial to the literary vogue for puns and allegory, since such exegetical texts often resound with a chorus of praise for the Bible’s “plain and simple” meaning. This formulation appears, for example, in the work of the late sixteenth-century exegete Robert Rollock, who writes, “the Scripture in it self is most plaine, and simple in sense and signification.”12 (The word “simple” is marked by an asterisk that takes the reader to a marginal note warning, “If the scriptures seeme doubtful, condemne thine owne sinne and corruption.”) Combined with Martin Luther’s notoriously salty anti-allegorical proclamations and the Victorian aversion to polysemy, these sixteenth-century assertions of the “plain and simple” biblical meaning led to the scholarly commonplace that Protestants embraced the literal sense of Scripture at the expense of allegorical interpretation.13 However, recent work – including that by this volume’s Thomas Fulton and Jay Zysk14 – has revealed the extent to which traditional critical assumptions about Protestant literalism are flawed. The Protestant concept of the “literal” was in fact much more complicated than was recognized by previous generations of scholars. Exegetical claims of biblical perspicuity did not negate the importance of “words of divers significations [and] amphibological sentences,” to borrow another phrase

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from Rollock.15 Indeed, a large part of the Protestant hermeneutical project was the effort to accommodate the theological demand for perspicuity with the textual complexities of the Bible. As Richard A. Muller writes in his monumental study of early modern hermeneutics, allegories and types are resident in the [biblical] text and have but a single significance. The doctrine of perspicuity is, thus, fundamentally a theological and hermeneutical issue that is bound to the problems of the relation of the testaments, the method of exegesis, the study of the rhetorical forms in the text, and the problems encountered by linguists and text-critics of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.16

Considering perspicuity as a theological concern rather than a strictly semiotic one enables a form of literalism that encompasses the allegorical, however paradoxical that might seem given our modern categories which posit the literal and the allegorical as antithetical. A particular manifestation of this complex, figurative literalism is what Cummings describes as “Protestant allegory.” Cummings (like Farrar) rehearses a litany of Luther’s vivid anti-allegorical statements, such as “Allegories are empty speculations, and as it were the scum of holy scripture.”17 But Cummings argues that, “the harsh sound bite of Luther’s radical stance should not be allowed to shout down other more modulated views which he voices about methods of reading.”18 Within Luther’s biblical analysis, Cummings in fact finds “a deeply figurative understanding of the literal.”19 To illustrate how Luther’s complicated understanding of the literal becomes amplified by later Protestants in England, Cummings takes the work of the prolific and phenomenally successful Elizabethan preacher and author William Perkins as a case in point. For Perkins, “allegory is a specialized type of the literal. In the same way, anagogical and tropological meanings are simply ‘applied’ forms of the same, single, literal sense. . . . The allegorical is a necessary function of the literal. In this way the literal sense broadens to take in other senses [of the fourfold quadriga].”20 In sum, Cummings concludes: “Rather than scoffing at [Perkins’s] dogged literal-mindedness, we might instead realize that his definition of the literal is much richer than at first sight seems to be the case. . . . Once a figurative reading was subsumed as part of the act of interpretation demanded by the literal, the literal sense was encountered as already rich and complex.”21 Cummings is not alone in recognizing this quality of the Protestant “literal” sense. David Steinmetz, for instance, argues that Protestants advocated “a letter pregnant with spiritual significance, a letter big-bellied

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with meanings formerly relegated by the quadriga to allegory or tropology.”22 James Kearney writes that, “In asserting the primacy of the literal sense, Tyndale does not embrace what we might call literalism. . . . For Tyndale, the letter is always pregnant with the spirit; God’s word is always in motion from hermeneutic promise to fulfillment.”23 The repeated image of pregnancy here is not mere scholarly poetic license, but an adaptation of the earlier meaning of “pregnancy.” The primary signification of “pregnant” in the early modern period was linguistic, indicating “Full of meaning, highly significant; suggestive, implying more than is obvious or stated” (OED adj. 1a); most of the OED’s fifteenth- through seventeenthcentury examples of the word pertain to Scripture, such as Bacon’s assertion that the Old Testament is “pregnant of a perpetual allegory.”24 This use of “pregnant” had a deep history; Aquinas had argued for “a plurality of the literal sense of Scripture” through the verb of impregnation (“Spiritus Sanctus fecundavit”), indicating “the fullness of the Holy Spirit’s knowledge and the Spirit’s ability to impregnate a text with more meaning than any human being can discern.”25 The use of “pregnant” to signify a polyvalent literal sense appears to have been culturally legible in Shakespeare’s time, given how it anchors a joke in a drama by Thomas Middleton. As Joanne Altieri argues in “Pregnant Puns and Sectarian Rhetoric: Middleton’s Family of Love,” Middleton’s play not only satirizes this sect’s “tendency to conflate the literal and the figurative,” but comically stages that verbal dynamic in Maria’s actual pregnancy.26 Polonius’s description of Hamlet’s language – “How pregnant sometimes his replies are” (2.2.205–6) – can therefore be seen less as an idiosyncratic observation than as an expression of how Hamlet’s form of punning and verbal play resonate with the period’s biblical hermeneutics. Hamlet’s speech patterns reflect a larger Shakespearean habit that is in keeping with contemporary discursive modes that privilege puns in a theological context. Sophie Read considers the sermons of Lancelot Andrewes, tracing how his fascination with punning is “a positive articulation of faith,” part of his belief in an originary perfect linguistic order, and part of a Christian tradition in which a pun was foundational (Jesus’s declaration “thou art Peter [Petrus], and upon this rock [petram] I will build my church” [Matt. 16:18]27). A pun on the Eucharistic “host” – signifying both the giver of hospitality and a sacrificial victim, based on its well-known Latin root “hostia” – is also central to forms of Christian liturgy that emphasize the rituals of both communal meal and Paschal sacrifice; this is a pun that is featured in contemporary texts as disparate as the poetry of George Herbert and Shakespeare’s Macbeth.28 Read perceives a fundamental difference, however,

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in how Andrewes and Shakespeare engage with puns (or syllepses, a single word with multiple meanings). She observes that “the active theological engagement that underpins Andrewes’s prose doesn’t shore up Shakespeare’s verse in the same way.”29 She argues that “Andrewes . . . dismantles the word to show how it works. He is more concerned to resolve than to generate (or risk) ambiguity, to exfoliate and explicate layers of existent meaning rather than to leave, as Shakespeare does, a pregnant word in an audience’s ear.”30 Read understands Shakespeare’s “pregnant word” to be less theologically engaged than Andrewes’s notion of a word. I disagree: rather than locating different degrees of engagement with theology, we find here different iterations of biblical hermeneutics. On the one hand, Andrewes’s practice of exfoliation reflects a concept of allegory comprised of a series of husks; on the other hand, Shakespeare’s (and Hamlet’s) “pregnant word[s]” typify an idea of multiple meanings compressed into one word. Both express strands of contemporary linguistic theory (which, in this period, was always theological), but Hamlet’s pregnant puns result from a specific Reformation problem in representation stemming from the compression of the figurative senses into “one sense” designated “literal.” Hamlet’s punning is thus not simply a personal foible or a character’s speech habit “peculiarly his own,” to borrow MacDonald’s phrase. Rather, Hamlet’s polysemy shares in a linguistic vogue driven by the period’s popularized concern with the structures of biblical text. The degree to which hermeneutic discourses about linguistic structures had entered the mainstream can be seen in Robert Greene’s comical Morando, the Tritameron of Love (1587). Here, when one character sleights another through a pun on “ordinary” (meaning both a self-appointed ecclesiastical adjudicator and a common tavern meal; OED n. 1.a and n. 12.b), the company smiles at “this misticall meaning”; another character steps in to make peace, noting that “a word mistaken is halfe a challeng: therefore gentlemen, leave these needless Allegories that have such an amphibologicall equivocation, and may admit such adverse construction.”31 Not only the characters within the story, but also the book’s popular readers are able to find humor in situating a pun within the heightened vocabulary of allegorical constructions. Reformation hermeneutics, disseminated through printed sermons that sought to educate biblical readers in proper modes of interpretation, extensively addressed the implications of biblical words to hold “two thoughts at once” – and indeed, to sometimes hold many more than two thoughts. The literary fashion for puns and the hermeneutic interest in amphibology, arising in large part from debates about

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biblical allegory, were not merely coincidental, but present different facets of the larger cultural interest in, and anxieties about, plurisignificance. Thus, while Hamlet’s puns often convey philosophical, ontological, and what we would call psychological depth, his speech habit also takes a current literary/ hermeneutical fashion and pushes it to extremes. Shakespeare’s Protestant character, fresh from Wittenberg, seems wryly and uneasily preoccupied with the incapacity of language itself to represent just one sense; his puns exemplify, but also test the boundaries of, multivalent literalism. In what follows, I will show how Hamlet’s puns – broadening out into his amphibological wordplay more generally – engage with a particular hermeneutic construction, that of a multivalent literal sense. I will first demonstrate, through a number of sermons, how the Protestant longing for a “plain and simple” literal meaning of biblical passages frequently moved into richly complex and layered figurative readings; the model of Protestant allegory that Cummings located in Luther and Perkins pervades English sermons of the 1590s. I will then turn to a number of moments in Hamlet where we find this hermeneutic model in play.

“O how many wonders in howe few wordes?” In Protestant allegory, we find a form of the “literal” that compresses or contains the other interpretive levels of the medieval quadriga (the allegorical, moral, and anagogical). This idea of the literal-allegorical may seem absurd to us, but it was of great interest to those living in a period that not only valorized the pun but privileged the philosophical conundrums of paradox. In a variety of religious texts – popular biblical commentaries, learned treatises, and sermons – authors worked through the idea of a literal reading filled with multiple senses. In exegetical literature of the late sixteenth century, we often find a pattern: an opening salvo argues against modes of allegorical interpretation and asserts that there is only the plain, literal meaning, but as the text proceeds the author explicates the manifold layers of meaning that inhere in a single word or phrase. Preachers contemporary to Shakespeare frequently followed this pattern of moving from simple literalism to something more polysemous. In a remarkable sermon of John King, Lectures upon Jonas (1599), King initially rails against allegory, even equating it with mental illness: But it is the maner of some to languish about wordes, and in seeking deepely after nothing, to loose not onely their time, travel, and thankes, but their wits also. Such hath beene the sickenesse of all the Allegoristes, . . . who not

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Yet in spite of this opening praise of the “literall and genuine sense of the scripture,” King himself extols the dark “mysterie” of scriptural language in his sermons. Writing of the story of Jonah, King marvels, “O how many wonders in howe few wordes? How many riddles and darke speeches to the reason of man?”33 Indeed, the story of Jonah is singled out as a place of particular semiotic depth; for readers seeking wisdom that is “not to be uttered by the tongue, nor to be comprehended by the wisdome of mortal man, I remit you to those chapters. Jerome writeth of the whole booke, Singula in eo verba plena sunt sensibus, Every word of it is very sententious.”34 If the whole book of Jonah is one in which multiple senses are packed into every word, the bit with the whale is the most concentrated moment of this verbal concentration. King does issue caveats and delimits proper boundaries of interpretation: the whale cannot be taken as overt allegory (“The belly of hell, you heare, but in a type or figure, where the worde is mistaken and abused, and brought from his proper sense”); he refuses to engage with the claims that the fish was pregnant or created at that moment; and justifies Matthew’s decision to translate the original “a great fish” as a “whale” (per the Septuagint), since this “abridge[s], & name[s] more distinctly in one, shewing the kinde of the fish.”35 But fundamentally, in the episode of Jonah in the whale, “Singula in eo verba plena sunt sensibus”: each of the words is laden with meaning.36 We are left with a “literall and genuine sense of the scripture” that is written with richly plurisignificant words. In another London sermon preached quite close to Shakespeare and his playgoers, A sermon preached at Paules Crosse, the 24 of December 1597, by John Howson, Student of Christs-Church in Oxford, Howson begins, as is typical, with a disavowal of traditional, opaque modes of biblical interpretation: It is affirmed by them that have best labored, and even spent their spirits to discover the profound mysteries of the holy scriptures, that the text, Contextus, the web of it, is so cunningly and so skillfully woven by the holy spirit of God, that it is, omnibus accessibilis, but paucissimis penetrabilis [marginal note Aug. Epist. 5]; that is, to be handled & felt of anie man, but few eies can pearce to the ground worke of it . . . If there were a booke written, a particular book of every particular word almost, in the holy scriptures; yet the mysteries of them could not by that meanes be sufficiently discovered to us.37

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In this view, the Bible is open to all, but understood by few. Indeed, even the comprehension of these few cannot be exhaustive, regardless of Howson’s hypothetical exegetical copia (i.e., a book of interpretation written on every word). Since this is the case, Howson continues, there is no point in explicating his biblical text in the mode of the quadriga: “Wherefore (right Honorable, & c.) it is not to bee expected at my hands, that . . . I should deliver unto you whatsoever is noteable or noted alreadie by so manie reverend and learned Fathers (old and new) of the litterall, historicall, morall, or allegorical sense of this scripture.”38 Howson contends that he embraces a fresh, innovative hermeneutic. But in spite of his assertion that he will not be presenting the “litterall, historicall, morall, or allegorical sense of this scripture,” we do, in fact, find the compression of the historical, spiritual, and eschatological meaning, compressed into his notion of the literal. Howson’s text is Matthew 21:12–13, Jesus’s cleansing of the temple; he runs out of time for the full sermon, but it is continued on May 21, 1598.39 Here, Howson begins with a reading of the temple as an actual place in Jerusalem, then considers “Gods house” as a spiritual habitation of God, which takes Howson to Adam, Abraham, and Moses, before he equates the temple with “Churches.”40 The “temple” that Jesus cleanses is thus an historical place; typologically connected to Old Testament figures; a spiritual/moral dwelling; and, anagogically, the larger “Church.” Far from refuting plurisignificance, Howson makes the rather dazzling claim that the speeches of Christ are at once simple and cabbalistic: “he that is well conversant in the holy scriptures, may perceive that all the speeches of our Saviour Christ, have either the perfect forme of a Cabala (as they call it) containing a most simple, most true, most deepe, most certaine exposition of mysticall things in the scriptures.”41 George Gyfford’s Sermons vpon the whole booke of the Reuelation (1596, 1599) also acknowledges the complexity of the literal sense even as it rejects Catholic allegoresis. In his sermons, Gyfford begins by associating mysterious interpretations of Revelation with Papists [who] indeed cannot abide, that the people should have any part of the holy Scriptures in a knowne language, nor that they should have any skill or understanding in them . . . And our English Jesuites of Rhemes, alledge for this purpose a saying of Hierome, that the [Book of] Revelation hath as many mysteries as words, and that in every word there is hidden manifold and sundry senses.42

Gyfford objects to such plurisignificance because it opens the way to multiple interpretive possibilities: “Where there is such mysticall sense and ambiguitie, what certaintie can there be in the exposition? And if the

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interpretation be not certaine, but that one will say this is the sense, an other will differ from him, and say that is the sense, and a third from them both, to what purpose should it be interpreted?”43 And yet he does not offer the Apocalypse as easy reading. Rather, Gyfford contrasts the human exegesis of the Catholics with what he understands as God-given interpretation, in which “the Lord . . . expoundeth the darkest and the most mysticall things, at the least so many of them, and so farre, as the rest are thereby laid open and made manifest.”44 This being the case, Gyfford’s populist reading politics hardly lead to literalism in the sense of a plain and simple reading suitable for a common audience. His interpretation of something as seemingly simple as the white hair of Revelation’s Christ figure becomes richly, complexly layered. Gyfford claims that his “haires were white, as white wooll, and as snow: the white colour in the Scripture doth sometime represent innocencie and purite: sometime heavenly glorie, light and joy.” Then again, “the head and haires, . . . doth rather represent his full and ripe knowledge and wisdom to performe all things in his Church: for the auncient in dayes have wisedome and knowledge, and their haires & heads grow whiter, as they waxe older.” The simple and plain association of white hair and age is emphasized: “Indeed touching this figure, we must not extend it further then unto one point: for old men by the multitude of dayes gather wisedome: they be white headed if they waxe exceeding old.” Further, the hair represent[s] a full ripenesse of wisdom, the vision is with head and haires as white as white wooll, and as snow. But thus it holdeth not, that as by the number of dayes, natural heate decaying in men, they grow feeble, and their haires waxe white, so God should also waxe old: for there is no change or waxing old in God, not in Jesus Christ, not in increase of wisedome in the deitie by any experience.45

This explication offers another instance of what Cummings finds in Perkins, as “the literal sense broadens to take in other senses” of the quadriga. The white hair is a sign of age (the literal), a symbol of purity (the allegorical), the “knowledge and wisdom to performe all things in his Church” (the moral/tropological), and a sign of the kingdom to come (the anagogical). For Gyfford, this mode of interpretation – which obviously packs the single reference to white hair with manifold meaning – is sharply differentiated from traditional, Catholic allegorical interpretation; this is Gyfford’s idea of an “open and manifest” signification. Finally, we turn to the complicated exegesis of Robert Rollock in A Treatise of Gods Effectual Calling (Edinburgh, 1597; London, 1603).

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Rollock, as noted earlier, does indeed write that “the sacred Scripture is of it selfe most single and plaine, voide of all ambiguitie, and Amphibologie,” and in doing so he challenges those who argue “that the scripture is full of tropes, allegories, parables, words of divers significations, amphibological sentences, visions; all which have their ambiguity.”46 And yet, Rollock’s further explanation draws on types with multiple significance: “And as for scriptures concerning types, they have but one signification . . . one very sense of the types is applied to signify another thing . . . for the types themselves carry in them the signification of the things signified, and shadowed by the types, and not the words themselves which are used to set forth the types.”47 The word that signifies the type has only one meaning, but the type being signified has the “signification of the things signified.” As an example of this principle, Rollock shows us that “this name Sarah signifieth Abrahams wife, that is, the type only: next the type signifieth the covenant, that is, the thing shadowed, figured, and signified by the type.”48 This multivalent interpretation of “Sarah” is thus a Protestant understanding of “single and plaine” literal meaning. The Protestant “literal” (or similar formulations, like “single and plaine”) often indicates a compacted polysemy, not monovocality. Understanding Protestant hermeneutics as a compression of figurative and allegorical meanings into a single surface, rather than the tiered, segregated multivalence of the quadriga, reveals an interpretive and literary sensibility that is distinctive from (albeit part of a larger historical continuum with) medieval modes of exegesis and Enlightenment rational categories. King’s whale, Howson’s temple, Gyfford’s white hair, Rollock’s Sarah: all of these single words present a “plain” surface that proves richly polysemous. This understanding of the “literal” enables us to see more clearly how sixteenthcentury Reformation hermeneutics can play out in verbal structures – such as the pun – where multitiered signification is brought to a single layer that paradoxically retains its linguistic multiplicity.

“Though this be madness yet there is method in’t” The pun, like the reformer’s notion of the literal, can operate as a twodimensional verbal form with compacted three-dimensional meaning. Certainly not all puns carry this level of depth and interest – Hamlet’s initial homophonic pun on son/sun, for instance, does not go very far. But many of Hamlet’s puns – which extend into even more expansive wordplay – exhibit a type of compression that has striking affinities with the types of biblical verbal structures teased out in contemporary sermons, as

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shown earlier. In what follows, I will examine some of Hamlet’s puns which I believe tap into contemporary concerns about the relationship of the literal and the allegorical. My aim is not to establish a definitive confessional identity for the Danish Prince (although insofar as there are Catholic and Protestant polarities within the play, he quite clearly gravitates toward the latter). Rather, I hope to show how Hamlet – like Greene’s character who cites “amphibologicall equivocation” in a comical pamphlet, or Middleton’s pregnant sectarian who embodies the literal/figurative on the popular stage – plays with the verbal constructions that were theorized in contemporary hermeneutical writings. Recognizing the consonance of Hamlet’s puns (and, more broadly, his amphibology) and Protestant notions of the literal-allegorical sense of Scripture provides deeper insight into how extensively biblical hermeneutics impacted English discursive culture around 1600. Throughout Hamlet, the Prince’s wordplay ties into the particular discursive context of the late sixteenth century. One example is Hamlet’s extensive use of hendiadys, a single idea conveyed by a doubling of nouns, such as “the book and volume of my brain” (1.5.103). As James Shapiro has shown, “Something happened in [1599] . . . that led Shakespeare to invoke this figure almost compulsively. But nowhere is its presence felt more than in Hamlet, where there are sixty-six of them, or one every sixty lines – and that’s counting conservatively.”49 Shakespeare’s (or Hamlet’s) interest in hendiadys is not unique; King theorizes about hendiadys in his 1599 Lectures upon Jonas. The particular context is a discussion that distinguishes the speaking style of the narrator of the Book of Jonah, whose style is “single and plaine,” and Jonah himself, whose speech, by contrast, is “full of ornament and maiesty, full of translated and varied phrases, as if a sentence of ordinarye tearmes were not sufficient to expresse his miseries.”50 In particular, King notes Jonah’s propensity to double his words: “But the stile of Jonas himselfe in every parte is doubled and iterated. For where it was saide before at once, Jonas prayed, now, hee cried and cried. . . . And the belly of the fish there mentioned, is now, both pressure and tribulation”; “the trouble he speaketh of is not properly trouble, but narrowness & streights.”51 The similarities between Hamlet’s and Jonah’s speech patterns (in King’s description) – an attraction to doubling, “as if a sentence of ordinarye tearmes were not sufficient to expresse his miseries” – is tantalizingly suggestive. Whether or not Shakespeare directly encountered King’s sermon, the larger point here is that Hamlet’s propensity for hendiadys is not just a personal, idiosyncratic verbal tic, but reflective of a cultural interest in particular types of discursive ornament.

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Beyond puns and hendiadys, Hamlet’s speech patterns reflect cultural hermeneutic preoccupations through his interest in equivocation. Some of Hamlet’s puns are equivoques, such as his retort to Queen Gertrude that it is “common” (carrying insulting and even subversive meanings as both lower class and sexually promiscuous) to remarry. Such equivocation taps into the Jesuit practice of dissimulation – speaking in multiple meanings, and with “mental reservation,” to maintain inner probity while avoiding public disclosure of dangerous opinions.52 Hamlet’s pervasive punning can render his language continuously elusive in the charged political environment of the court. Hamlet’s puns serve a range of functions, reflect a number of cultural concerns, and have a variety of constructions. He is, in fact, an inveterate punster – by one count, he makes “no less than ninety” puns.53 (To put this in perspective, quantitative analyses suggest the Shakespearean plays contain about 3,000 total puns, with an average of 78 per play.54) Hamlet’s promiscuous fondness for puns may typify King’s description of allegory sickness: “it is the maner of some to languish about wordes, and in seeking deepely after nothing, to loose . . . their wits also. Such hath beene the sickenesse of all the Allegoristes.” Hamlet’s amphibologic symptoms derive from many pathologies – his Jesuitical need for plausible deniability, his aesthetic delight in verbal dexterity, and his psychologically mixed motives among them. But some of them also derive from “pregnant” Protestant allegory, and as such are part of the play’s larger positioning of Hamlet’s tragedy in relation to confessionally specific problematics. As is well known, the play associates Hamlet with Protestantism in identifying Hamlet as a university student in the Lutheran epicenter of Wittenberg. Hamlet and his circle are repeatedly termed “scholars”: “Thou art a scholar – speak to it, Horatio” (Marcellus, 1.1.41); “I prithee do not mock me, fellow student” (Hamlet to Horatio, 1.2.176); “As you are friends, scholars and soldiers” (Hamlet to Horatio and Marcellus, 1.5.140). Gertrude observes Hamlet’s studiousness (“But look where sadly [i.e., seriously] the poor wretch comes reading” [2.2.165]), while Horatio teases Hamlet as the type of scholar who studies all of the marginal glosses (“I knew you must be edified by the margin ere you had done” [5.2.137–8]). And their university town of Luther’s Wittenberg is mentioned repeatedly in the first scene with all of the major characters (see 1.2.11–12, 1.2.119, 1.2.164, 1.2.167). In Hamlet, we meet a university student who sometimes speaks in the vein of Oxford’s John Howson delivering a sermon, echoing the language of Protestant allegory in ways that are variously parodic or sincere, pedantic or devout.

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On a crude level worthy of Luther’s more reductive polemics, Hamlet foregrounds allegorical hermeneutics in an exchange that mocks allegorical reading, as Hamlet plays out the hermeneutic problem expressed by Gyfford: “And if the interpretation be not certaine, but that one will say this is the sense, an other will differ from him, and say that is the sense, and a third from them both, to what purpose should it be interpreted?”55 Here, Hamlet points to a passing cloud: hamlet polonius hamlet polonius hamlet polonius

Do you see yonder cloud that’s almost in shape of a camel? By th’ mass and ’tis like a camel indeed. Methinks it is like a weasel. It is backed like a weasel. Or like a whale? Very like a whale. (3.2.367–73)

This could be read as Polonius humoring Hamlet, whom he presumes to be mad, but in the context of the patterns of the play it seems more likely that Hamlet is teasing Polonius with multiplicitous interpretive possibilities. The exchange presents a parody not just of interpretation, but of a form of allegorical reading – we might think of Luther’s notorious statement that when he was a monk, he could allegorize anything, even a chamber pot.56 But if this moment mocks Polonius and vacuous allegorical interpretation – the facile and ungrounded assignation of figurative meaning – elsewhere Hamlet engages with polysemous language in a much more sophisticated way. A running comedic tension in the play is the contrast between Hamlet’s complex hermeneutic facility and the dense incomprehension of Polonius. If one generational divide in the play is between a Catholic father and a son “with a distinctly Protestant temperament” and a different belief system,57 another is between a younger generation with an understanding of complex Protestant literalism, in all of its turn-ofthe-century intellectual chic, and those who don’t get it – “These tedious old fools,” in Hamlet’s terms (2.2.214). Hamlet stages different approaches to polysemy in dialogues between the obtuse and literalist Polonius and the verbally lithe Hamlet, whose writhing words signal his linguistic philosophy. Polonius’s factual query of “What do you read, my lord?” (2.2.188) meets with a strikingly literal response: “Words, words, words.” At the same time, the response suggests numinous linguistic mystery, semiotic overflow, and the unsettlingly stark and even alienating qualities of language. Polonius’s attempt at clarification – “What is the matter, my lord?” – seeks transparency even as the sentence becomes its own pun, almost

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becoming a speech act affirming Hamlet’s sense of the inescapability of language that escapes determinate meaning. Yet Hamlet whips the conversation back into a vertiginous mixture of the literal and the figurative: hamlet Between who? polonius I mean the matter that you read, my lord. hamlet Slanders, sir. For the satirical rogue says here that old men have grey beards, that their faces are wrinkled, their eyes purging thick amber and plumtree gum, and that they have a plentiful lack of wit together with most weak hams – all which, sir, though I most powerfully and potently believe, yet I hold it not honesty to have it thus set down. For yourself, sir, shall grow old as I am – if, like a crab, you could go backward. polonius [aside] Though this be madness yet there is method in’t. – Will you walk out of the air, my lord? hamlet Into my grave. polonius [aside] Indeed, that’s out of the air. How pregnant sometimes his replies are. (2.2.191–206)

The “matter” that is the literal, material presence of the book contains (per Hamlet) a discursus that reads like a parodic version of Gyfford’s lengthy description of the white hair in Revelation as signifying aging (“they be white headed if they waxe exceeding old”). After over-literalizing what is being read (words), Hamlet now packs the literal “matter” with language that seems to overflow with seeming figurative significance. In effect, Hamlet takes words into two extremes, at once rendering them hyperliteral, and overly crammed with interpretive meaning. This recurs in his answer to Polonius’s suggestion that they step outside (“will you walk out of the air”), and Hamlet’s answer “into my grave.” As Thompson and Taylor observe, “Hamlet puts a grimly literal interpretation on his words.”58 Yet “into my grave” also seems potentially figurative, with a distinction between airy and grave (serious), and introduces a pun on air/heir, since Hamlet will no longer be the heir when he is in the grave. Hamlet’s language echoes (and distorts) the exegetical culture of the 1590s in a way that is paradoxically irreverent and profound, recognizing both the futility and the necessity of interpretation, and the multivalence of words that have a strikingly materialist, literal meaning. We find another instance of this when Claudius greets Hamlet before “The Mousetrap”: claudius How fares our cousin Hamlet? hamlet Excellent, i’faith! Of the chameleon’s dish – I eat the air, promisecrammed. You cannot feed capons so. king I have nothing with this answer, Hamlet. These words are not mine. hamlet No, nor mine now, my lord. (3.2.89–95)

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Hamlet takes Claudius’s formulaic greeting (essentially, “How’s it going?”) and turns it back into its literal meaning (“What are you eating?”) with his pun on “fare.” His imagery, like his language, becomes changeable and chameleonlike; his puns are no longer syllepses, but acquire a strange and disorienting polyvalence. The dish – a material utensil; a type of food – is rendered immaterial as it is turned to “air.” But this air – like the literal sense overstuffed with spiritual meanings – becomes “promised-crammed,” an image which again invokes both the intensely immaterial (promises) and the material (crammed). If, as Dent suggests, Hamlet is alluding to the proverb “Love is a chameleon that feeds on air,”59 the line equates Hamlet with a chameleon, and thus Hamlet with love. Then, too, we hear the “promise-crammed heir.” This, again, would be Hamlet, although “promise” and “heir” have eschatological overtones. There is not an exact mapping here onto the four levels of the medieval quadriga – the literal, the allegorical (what to believe), the tropological (how to live), and the anagogical (what to hope for), with the last three spiritual senses corresponding to the Christian virtues of faith, love, and hope, respectively. But they seem to all be here: “Excellent, i’faith”; love as a chameleon; the hope of promises. We might note, with Polonius, that “Though this be madness, yet there is method in’t” (2.2.202–3), a method that has striking affinities with Reformation hermeneutics. As Steinmetz notes, “[i]f we want to identify what is genuinely new about this new [Reformation] hermeneutic, it will not be its stress on the literal sense or its reluctance to appeal to an allegorical reading.” Instead, “[t]he newer, though not altogether new, hermeneutic feels a sense of discomfort with multiple levels of meaning and shows a tendency to over-stuff the letter with spiritual meanings.”60 In the end, Hamlet’s complex punning not only reveals a sly, sometimes caustic engagement with contemporary hermeneutical theory and practice – the type of biblical training that a young man might have received at university in Wittenberg, or through listening to John Howson’s student-focused sermons at St. Paul’s,61 or through purchasing and reading the cheap print version of Howson’s sermons – but it might even serve as a structural model of the self. Hamlet, famously, conceptualizes his brain and memory as a book: Remember thee? Yea, from the table of my memory I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records, All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past That youth and observation copied there And thy commandment all alone shall live Within the book and volume of my brain (1.5.97–104) Unmixed with baser matter.

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This passage has been of recent scholarly interest in the context of the history of material text,62 but we should also note its resonance with contemporary sermons. In a sermon printed in 1599, we read, “What, doe you thinke that God dooth not remember our sinnes which we doe not regarde? for while we sinne, the score runs on, and the Judge setteth downe all in the table of remembrance.”63 But God is not the only one keeping a written record. In a 1599 printing of John Bradford’s sermons, we are told how Bradford used to make unto himselfe an Ephemeris, or a Journall, in which he used to write all such notable things, as either he did see or heare, each day that passed. But whatsoeuer he did heare or see, he did so pen it, that a man might see in that booke, the signes of his smitten heart. . . . And thus hee made to himselfe, and of himselfe, a booke of dayly practices of repentance. (my italics)64

Hamlet, like Bradford, makes “of himselfe, a booke . . . that a man might see in that booke, the signes of his smitten heart.” Indeed, Hamlet appears to make himself not just any book, but a form of Bible: he erases the “trivial fond records” of a youthful copy book, and overwrites it with the father’s “commandment,” a word with blatant biblical associations. The material simplicity of the book that Hamlet invites us to envision (the messy, overflowing copia of “all trivial fond records, / All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past” supplanted by the clean, single dictate of “thy commandment all alone”) suggests corresponding moral clarity. Yet the charged, overlaid significance of “commandment” explodes this impression. Through his words, Hamlet has caused us to picture his interiority as the “book and volume” (once again, the subtly troubling instability of hendiadys) of a written commandment – an obvious invocation of the Ten Commandments, one of which, of course, is an injunction against murder. Yet here “thy commandment” refers not to God’s law, but to Hamlet’s father’s order to kill Claudius; “commandment” signifies diametrically opposed dictates. The plain and simple meaning of “thy commandment all alone” is charged with dark and disturbing polyvalence. Hamlet thus envisions himself as a book, but interpretation of this self/ book is fraught. From the beginning of the play, Hamlet is telling us how we are to read him through his “inky cloak” (1.2.77): “‘Seems,’ madam – nay it is, I know not ‘seems’” (1.2.76). Hamlet rejects “seems,” a word that could be said to be the hallmark of allegory. (“Seems” pervades Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene, for instance.) This rejection of “seeming” implies that Hamlet-as-book should be read literally. But this seeming textual

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simplicity is immediately complicated and layered: in a speech on clothing, “seems” becomes a homophonic pun on “seams.” In asserting his literalism, Hamlet – intentionally or not – thus speaks through multivalent language that evades a plain and simple meaning even for the briefest of words. If we were to read Hamlet like a book, we would find a literal level that was deeply charged with figurative significance. Hamlet, then, not only appears to sometimes speak and think through the type of Protestant allegory that was popularized in exegetical literature of the 1590s. He presents himself as the embodiment of this semiotic structure, and seems to demand a corresponding hermeneutic response from his audience and interlocutors. He is the antithesis of allegory, a plain and simple ink-clad figure who does not know “seems,” or a difference between inner and outer meaning. And yet, he has “that within which passes show” (1.2.85), a complex interiority below the plain surface, a form of semiotic pregnancy. In Hamlet we see not just how contemporary biblical hermeneutics could enter into discourse, but how they could shape an understanding of the self in a culture that understood that self to be connected to the material form of the book, and the contents of the Bible.65

chapter 5

England’s Jerusalem in Shakespeare’s Henriad Beatrice Groves

Shakespeare’s Henry IV dies in the Jerusalem Chamber, a location he recognizes as ironic: “It hath been prophesied to me many years, / I should not die but in Jerusalem, / Which vainly I supposed the Holy Land” (2 Henry IV, 4.3.364–6).1 Critics have accepted Henry’s reading and seen his death in the Jerusalem Chamber as a symbolic failure and “an ironic confirmation of the hollowness of his own promises.”2 Anthony Bale has argued that this irony is inflected by the religious context of Shakespeare’s time: “Shakespeare, writing in newly Protestant sixteenthcentury England, implies that Henry’s longed-for death in Jerusalem is a hallucination, both unreal and unrealistic, with the medieval king fooled by his counsellors and by the devices on the chamber’s walls into thinking that he has reached the Heavenly City.”3 Bale puts the medieval passion for “bringing Jerusalem home” (embodied in the existence of a Jerusalem Chamber at Westminster) in opposition to the sixteenth-century project of de-sanctification. This chapter also situates Henry IV’s death in the theological context of the late sixteenth century, but argues for a radically different reading of the moment. Protestant biblical exegesis centered on the typological connection between the faithful and Israel, and one of the most popular early modern tropes connected reformed London with the new Jerusalem. Preachers, pamphleteers, and poets all proclaimed to London that God “to thee hath given / That Cities title, that came downe from heaven.”4 The identification – at once commonplace and aspirational – means that Henry IV’s death in the Jerusalem Chamber can be read as a fulfillment rather than a failure. This chapter argues that the reformed desire to read London as England’s Jerusalem creates a new context for Henry’s death. The Henriad does not mock medieval ways of thinking, but reforges them for its own time. Far from being portrayed as a hallucination, Henry’s death in “Jerusalem” marks Shakespeare’s creative engagement with Protestantism’s aspirational longing. The irony perceived by Henry IV is, of course, present, but it is also itself a form of dramatic 87

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irony – for in recognizing only failure, Henry fails to understand the sense in which his desire has been fulfilled. Jerusalem holds a commanding position at three dramatic points in Shakespeare’s tetralogy: the conclusion of Richard II, which ends with Bolingbroke’s promise to “make a voyage to the Holy Land / To wash this blood off from my guilty hand” (5.6.49–50); the beginning of 1 Henry IV, when the new king speaks at length about “our holy purpose to Jerusalem” (1.1.101), and at the climax of 2 Henry IV when Henry dies in the Jerusalem Chamber and finally discovers that the literal journey to the holy city will never take place. According to Shakespeare’s chronicle sources, Henry IV’s “voyage which he meant to make into the holie land, there to recouer the citie of Ierusalem from the Infidels” was a decision made in the “last yeare of king Henries reigne.”5 Shakespeare, however, takes Henry’s contemplation of the holy city back to an earlier date so that his projected journey toward it creates a unifying trope for the entire Henriad. Although Henry IV fails to reach the historical city of Jerusalem, on another level he dies in a type of Jerusalem, since early modern biblical interpretation, which foregrounded the typological importance of the present time, had begun to identify London with the new Jerusalem. The Book of Revelation was a key text in early modern biblical interpretation,6 and England was proud to think of itself as prefiguring the eschatological vision of the new Jerusalem: “And I John saw the holy citie new Jerusalem come downe from God out of heauen, prepared as a bride trimmed for her husband. / And I heard a grat voice out of heauen saying, Beholde, the Tabernacle of God is with men, and he wil dwel with them: and they shall bee his people, and God himselfe shalbe their God with them” (Revelation 21.1–2).7 London’s association with Jerusalem enables a new understanding of Henry IV’s death scene, in which it lays the foundations for Henry V’s politics of unity. Barbara R. Rossing argues that Revelation’s binary between Jerusalem and Babylon/Rome employs this “two-city” topos politically and that the new Jerusalem embodies “an alternative vision and community structure”; it is “a contrasting political economy.”8 In the early modern period the language of the new Jerusalem continued to hold a distinctly political edge. The longing to embody the new Jerusalem is a desire for unity, a yearning that a factious country should become one, should be unified as “the house of the chosen Israelites.”9 In the dominant ideology of Henry V, the island of Britain is presented as united on the fields of Agincourt, and in this unity, it fulfills its status as a new Jerusalem, for “Jerusalem is built as a city that is at unity in itself” (Psalm 122:3).

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Revelation in Shakespeare’s England and the Henriad The political application of Revelation was to reach its apogee in the seventeenth century, but interest in Revelation was already building in the late Elizabethan period. Texts such as John Napier’s A Plaine Discouery of the whole Reuelation of Saint Iohn (1593) and Franciscus Junius’s Apocalypsis. A Briefe and Learned Commentarie vpon the Revelation of Saint Iohn (1592) indicate the popularity of the subject for readers. Revelation was also a popular text among early modern preachers. John Manningham, attending a sermon by Henoch Clapham (who had published a pair of sermons entitled A Description of new Jerushalem in 1601), notes how Revelation and Jerusalem were intertwined in early modern homiletics: “he expounded the opening of the seven seales in the Revelacion to have reference to sundry tymes, and the 6. to the destruction of Jerusalem.”10 Lady Margaret Hoby, another Elizabethan diarist, records on October 2, 1599, that she listened to a sermon on Revelation and wrote notes “in my testement” related to the preaching she had heard that day.11 Hoby’s biblical note-taking indicates another way that early modern audiences engaged with the Book of Revelation. Geneva Bibles often began with guidelines on “how to take profite by reading of the holy Scriptures,” encouraging readers to “marke” as they read; and many early modern readers (like Hoby) followed this advice in a literal sense. William H. Sherman estimates that one in five extant Bibles contain “significant inscriptions by early readers.”12 These markings provide evidence that biblical exegesis was not a rarefied activity in early modern England, but something in which many lay people were engaged. One reader, who thoroughly annotated his 1577 Geneva Bible (probably “Edward Duke” who marks his name at the front of the Bible), notes a sixteenth-century application for the persecution of Revelation 18:24, writing in the margin: “Rome and hir heads haue shed the blood of the saints of God, as in all ages is manifest especially in the Maryan times.”13 Another reader of a 1578 Geneva Bible read the printed marginalia to Revelation 13:18 (“Let him that hath wit, count the number of the beast”), but then wrote their own version of a cryptogram which identifies the beast with the Roman Church.14 The attention paid by early modern readers to biblical exegesis is shown by their careful reading of such glosses. One reader of a 1598 Geneva Bible, for example, has maniculed Franciscus Junius’s note to Revelation 12:14 in which the biblical text is interpreted as foretelling the actions of the church at the destruction of Jerusalem: “she fled swiftly from the assault of the deuill, and from the common destruction of Ierusalem, and went vnto a solitarie Citie beyond Iordan called Pella.”15 The fall of Jerusalem under the

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Roman siege of 70 AD fed into ideas of England as a new Jerusalem in the early modern period, and it is interesting that this reader picks out this passage of commentary to mark.16 This cultural interest in Jerusalem works its way into Shakespeare’s plays. Throughout the Henriad, Jerusalem is imagined as an unreachably distant, literal goal but it is also symbolically near at hand, as the civil unrest (which thrice leads to the deferral of the crusade) transforms England into a type of a fallen Jerusalem. As Hannibal Hamlin has argued, a nexus of biblical allusions in Richard II represent England “as fallen, exiled from its original happy state, as Jerusalem was after its fall, when it was mourned by Jeremiah and the Psalmist in exile following the Babylonian conquest.”17 Psalm 137 in particular – the great Psalm of exile – echoes through the play as Mowbray’s literal exile (imagined in the psalmist’s language of imprisoned tongues, unstringed harps, and cunning instruments cased up) interacts with the idea of the “exile of England from its proper self.”18 England is also wept over by the widowed Duchess of Gloucester in a version of the weeping widow of Lamentations as she declares the country to be “Desolate, desolate will I hence and die. / The last leave of thee takes my weeping eye” (Richard II, 1.2.73–4). Her repetition of the word “desolate,” her widowhood, and her description of herself as ceaselessly weeping all link her with Jerusalem’s personification in Lamentations, where the city is repeatedly described as desolate (1:4, 13, 16) and “as a widowe” (1:4) who “weepeth continually” (1:2).19 England, famously, is also presented as “this other Eden” (2.1.42) in Richard II.20 The images of Eden and Jerusalem connect, for the Bible presents mankind’s pilgrimage as a journey from the Edenic expulsion to the entry into the new Jerusalem – a journey from Genesis to the heavenly home of Revelation. The new Jerusalem represents, in Daniel Heinsius’s words from 1618, mankind’s return to Eden with “no Cherubim to hinder vs, no flaming sword to affright us. Now may wee all bee easily admitted, and bee made free denizens of the heavenly Ierusalem.”21 This universal pilgrimage from the Fall to salvation, from Eden to the new Jerusalem, is mapped onto England in the Henriad, as the fallen Eden of Richard II becomes the victorious homecoming of Henry V. Biblical language also surrounds Henry IV’s projected crusade. The king speaks of “Christ – / Whose soldier now, under whose blessèd cross / We are impressèd and engaged to fight” (1 Henry IV, 1.1.19–21). Shakespeare mediates the biblical image of being “a good soldier of Iesus Christ” (2 Timothy 2:3–4) through the specific military image of the Prayer Book baptism service: “manfully to fight vnder his banner . . . and to continue Christs faithfull

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souldier.”22 Christ’s banner is, heraldically speaking, the Resurrection flag: a white field with a red cross (more familiar as the arms of St. George and England). When the armies of Henry V fight under the banner of St. George at Harfleur (“Cry, ‘God for Harry! England and Saint George!’” [Henry V, 3.1.34]) they enact Henry IV’s imagined soldiering under the banner of the “blessèd cross.” Henry IV literalizes the biblical and Prayer Book metaphor of the Christian life as a war against sin into an actual crusade, and his heraldic pun connects his own projected crusade with his son’s final victory under the flag of St. George. At the close of Henry V, Henry IV’s crusading banner is recalled with Henry V’s prophecy that his heraldic union (with his “fair flower-de-luce,” Catherine of Valois) will produce a great crusading son: “Shall not thou and I, between Saint Denis and Saint George, compound a boy, half-French, half-English, that shall go to Constantinople and take the Turk by the beard?” (5.2.193–6). The aim that Henry IV expressed in Holinshed (of unifying Christian nations through retaking Jerusalem23) is remembered in the dream of a future child who will unite France and England in a crusade. At his death, Henry IV reveals the politic concerns that have always underlain his ostensibly spiritual journey: “to lead out many to the Holy Land, / Lest rest and lying still might make them look / Too near unto my state” (2 Henry IV, 4.3.338–40). Shakespeare retains Holinshed’s emphasis on unification, but his Henry IV aims to heal internal, rather than international, divisions. Henry IV claims (in the opening of 1 Henry IV) that since he has healed the wounds of civil war he can proceed to the conquest of Jerusalem, and yet civil unrest continually breaks out and repeatedly forces him to “neglect / Our holy purpose to Jerusalem” (1.1.100–1). Jerusalem cannot be reached until England is unified. When Henry IV suggests that the aims of his crusade should be transferred to his son who should likewise “busy giddy minds / With foreign quarrels” (2 Henry IV, 4.3.341–2), France is explicitly presented as a surrogate for the journey to Jerusalem. The heraldic pun in which England’s armies fight under Christ’s resurrection banner in Henry V (as the “blessèd cross” is also England’s national flag) underlines the way in which – symbolically, as well as politically – the victory in France functions as the fulfillment of the abortive journey to Jerusalem.

Bringing Jerusalem Home Elizabethan England was proud to consider itself the new Jerusalem; however, comparisons between the two had inauspicious beginnings. Jerome (trying to persuade Paulinus of Nola not to visit him in the holy

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land) argued that “access to the courts of heaven is as easy from Britain as it is from Jerusalem; for ‘the kingdom of God is within you’ [Luke 17:21].”24 Jerome uses Britain here as a place archetypally distant from Jerusalem, both in geographical terms and in the sense of any sanctity geography might confer. While Jerusalem is the omphalos of the world, Britain (“Angleterre”) was the back of beyond: “the angle or limit of the earth.”25 One reason for the seventeenth-century interest in Jewish resettlement in England was a literalist reading of biblical prophecy that the end times would follow the “scattering” of “the power of the holy people” (Daniel 12:7). Such prophecies were read in reference to England’s obscure position: “our scattering, by little, and little, should be amongst all people, from the one end of the earth even unto the other; as is written Deut. 28:64. I conceived that by the end of the earth might be understood this Island.”26 England’s geographical distance from Jerusalem could, counterintuitively, become a sign of its biblical importance. Ralph Josselin, reading Revelation 21:9–10 (“and he carried me away in the spirit to a great and high mountain, and shewed me that great city, the holy Jerusalem” [KJV]) interpreted its reference to “a kingdome a great distance from Jerusalem” in reference to his homeland: “our deare England in the farthest corner of the world.”27 As Barbara Lewalski has influentially argued, reformed exegesis taught English Protestants that biblical history was not merely “exemplary to them but as actually recapitulated in their lives.”28 Thus, vast distances of space and time were no barrier (just as Jerome had maintained to Paulinus of Nola). Jerome’s dismissive reference to Britain as a country from the back of beyond, however, was to become a matter of pride. While this pride would become more prominent in the seventeenth century, it was already audible in the 1590s: “wherefore the word Sion, doth not restraine this promise of God vnto the Iewes only dwelling in that earthly Sion . . . but vnder this name Sion, is signified the Church of God at all times, and into what parts and quarters of the world soeuer it shall then bee scattered.”29 Holinshed’s 1587 chronicles of England end with the declaration that “the commonwealth of England, [is] a corner of the world, O Lord, which thou hast singled out for the magnifieng of thy maiestie.”30 England was literally distant from Jerusalem, but the biblical call to all “that are a farre off” (Acts 2:39) meant that geographical distance was no impediment to considering Englishmen the new people of God: “now euery hill is Sion, euery riuer is Iordan, euery countrie Iewry, euery citie Ierusalem, euery faithfull companie, yea euery bodie the Temple. And his couenant is to all that are a farre off, euen as many as God shal call, Act.2.39.”31 Throughout the 1580s and

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’90s (and particularly after the defeat of the Armada) Englishmen celebrated their country as “our Ierusalem”;32 “her Maiesties Israel euen the allotted inheritance of the Lorde”;33 God’s “little Mount Sion”;34 and “a new Israel” of God’s “chosen and peculier people.”35 Such language is a metaphorical version of the more literal transfer of holiness which had always been part of pilgrimages, when pilgrims (through relics and measurements) brought Jerusalem back home. Many medieval pilgrims had literally “rebuilt” Jerusalem when they returned home, making architectural copies of the sacred sites from measurements they had taken in Jerusalem, and it was believed that “a transfer of measurements was enough to ensure a transfer of the divine power believed to reside in the original building.”36 According to the late fifteenth-century Walsingham ballad, for example, the building of the Holy House at Walsingham to the exact specifications of the Holy House in Bethlehem meant that England was worthy “to be called in every realme and regyon / The holy lande.”37 The mid-fifteenth-century English pilgrim William Wey brought home “the lengthe of oure Lorde hys sepulkyr” and he used measurements taken on his pilgrimage to build models of the Holy Sepulchre, the Mount of Olives, and the church of Bethlehem at his home in Wiltshire.38 While such remodeling practices ended abruptly with the Reformation, early modern travel accounts nonetheless continue to include accurate measurements of the holy sites. William Lithgow, a Scottish traveler who visited the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in 1612, records that the distance between the Holy Sepulchre and Mount Calvary is “forty of my paces,”39 just as an eleventhcentury pilgrim had measured the same distance and noted that “from Mount Calvary it is thirteen feet toward the west to the middle of the world.”40 The measurements of travelers such as Lithgow can be read as the scientific rationalism of Protestant minds, unmoved by the sanctity of the place and filling the awkward emotional hiatus with the comforting solidity of numbers; critics often perceive their exactitude as a sign of an incipiently secular approach to the holy sites, anticipating as it does the empirical method required by the Royal Society’s instructions for travelers.41 It has even been suggested that it was not until the mid-seventeenth century that travelers to the holy land made “careful plans and measurements.”42 Yet early modern Protestant travelers, such as Lithgow, Henry Timberlake, and George Sandys, were copying precisely the measurements that pilgrims had long taken. They carefully measured the length of Christ’s tomb, for example, as had generations of pilgrims before them (such as the tenthcentury Spanish priest Jacinthus, who notes with precision that “the length of the tomb is four arms and two thumbs, and its height four palms”).43

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The early modern interest in mapping out Jerusalem – measuring “the distaunce betweene place and place”44 – has a biblical origin in the extensive measuring of the house of God in Ezekiel 40, as well as roots in the practice of pilgrims who brought back these measurements to their home countries as relics. These measurements enable those who have not been to the holy land to imagine it for themselves. William Wey’s carefully measured models in Wiltshire, for instance, enable Jerusalem to be encountered in an English setting. This had, in fact, always been the intention of pilgrim accounts. Abbot Daniel prefaces his twelfth-century pilgrim narrative with the explanation that, “I have written this for the faithful, so that, in hearing the description of the holy places, they might be mentally transported to them, from the depths of their souls, and thus obtain from God the same reward as those who have visited them.”45 If Abbot Daniel speaks of transporting the reader to Jerusalem, Henry Timberlake’s carefully measured account aims at something closer to bringing Jerusalem back home. In A True and Strange Discourse of the Trauailes of Two English Pilgrimes (1603), Timberlake compares biblical spaces to actual contemporary houses. The arch of Pilate’s palace is likened to “the way of passage under master Hammons house in the Bulwarke”; the gallery from which Jesus “was showen unto the Jewes, and they standing belowe in the street, heard the words of Ecce homo” is compared to the comfort of Master Hammon’s dwelling: “Pilate had two greate windowes in the saide Gallerie, to gaze out both waies into the streete, as master Hammon hath the like advantage at both his windowes.”46 It is tempting to view Timberlake’s commonplace comparisons as part of the demystifying agenda of Protestant narrative. Yet, as with pilgrim accounts, such parallels also enable an accurate visualization of the topography of the holy land, and enable Timberlake’s readers to imagine Jerusalem in relation to their own native landscape, England’s capital city in particular. Timberlake writes: “For your more easie and perfect understanding, I will familiarly compare the seuerall places, wt some of our natiue English townes and villages, according to such true estimation as I heer made of them. Imagin then I begin with London, as if it were the citie of Ierusalem.”47 The relative distances of sacred biblical sites are then mapped with endearing familiarity: “the citie of Bethlehem, where Christ our Sauiour was born is from Ierusalem as Wansworth is from London”; “the brooke Cedron is from Ierusalem, as the ditch without Algate, which runnes to the Tower from London”; and “the Lake of Sodome and Gomorrah, is from Ierusalem as Gravesend is from London.”48

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This propensity for affiliating Jerusalem with local places, then, was a familiar element of early modern culture. While preachers drew metaphorical and exalted connections between London and Sion – declaring that “glorious things are spoken of this Cittie of God”49 – Protestant travelers made the same identification but in more accessible, even faintly comic, terms. For instance, Laurence Aldersey, who traveled to the holy land in 1581, makes a startling comparison (first published in 1589 in Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations) between an English tavern and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre: the mount of Caluaria is a great church, and within the doore therof, which is litle, and barred with yron, and fiue great holes in it to looke in, like the holes in tauerne doores in London . . . right ouer the sepulchre is a deuise or lanterne for light, and ouer that a great louer, such as are in England in ancient houses.50

Just as with the measurements discussed earlier, comparisons of the holy sites with familiar places had long been a feature of pilgrim accounts, and continued to play out in the discursive environment of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.51

Jerusalem and London in the Henriad Such homely associations of London and Jerusalem are found likewise in 2 Henry IV – both in the bricks and mortar Jerusalem Chamber of the main plot, but also in the comic imaginings of London in the subplot. In his Gloucestershire orchard, Justice Shallow reminisces fondly about his youthful days in the capital, when he fought “with one Samson Stockfish, a fruiterer, behind Gray’s Inn,” and when he raises a toast “to all the cavalieros about London” – to which Davy wistfully responds, “I hope to see London once ere I die” (3.2.28–9; 5.3.57–8). The classic pilgrim-longing to see Jerusalem once before death had been recently, if rather more profanely, used in a similarly comic manner in Thomas Nashe’s Choise of Valentines (c. 1592), where the lover’s premature ejaculation is described as “to dye ere it hath seene Ierusalem.”52 Shallow’s provincial servant casts London as Jerusalem: the devoutly desired but almost mythically unreachable urban space. This is likewise how Jerusalem had appeared at the beginning of 1 Henry IV, when Henry IV’s projected destination is marked as both chronologically (“fourteen hundred years ago,” “twelve month old”) and spatially (“as far as to the sepulchre of Christ” [1.1.26, 28, 19]) distant. In one of the many complex interrelations

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of the main and subplots of the Henriad, Davy imagines London as a kind of English Jerusalem – which he hopes to see before he dies – immediately after Henry IV has found it to be one by dying there. Darryl Grantley has written persuasively of the way in which Londonbased plays performed in the capital invite the audience “imaginatively into the terrain of dramatic action through the evocation of the urban environment that they inhabit,” and thus increase both the “theatrical vigour” of the plays and render their “dramatic narratives more indiscriminately polysemic . . . through the vagaries of individual audience members’ experiences of London’s spaces.”53 This is an accurate description of almost all of the named London sites of 2 Henry IV – Smithfield, St. Paul’s, Eastcheap, St. George’s Field, Lombard Street, Fleet Prison, Pie Corner, Mile-End Green, Gray’s Inn Fields, and Turnbull Street – but it is not true of the most evocative and memorable metropolitan location of the play: the Jerusalem Chamber. The interpretive power given to the audience by situating dramatic action in known and experienced London sites is noticeably absent from this private space at the heart of London. Shakespeare’s staging of Westminster Abbey, and its Jerusalem Chamber, embodies Elizabethan drama’s celebration of an idealized London: a site where political and divine power converge in a monarch who is at once both the center of governmental and religious institutions and the locus of numinous and earthly importance in the kingdom. The resonant yet mysterious space of the Jerusalem Chamber is the perfect locus for imagining a new civic ideal. Westminster Abbey, founded by Edward the Confessor, was rebuilt by Henry III in what has been called “the formation of the English royal state: the process whereby the state, the government, and the persona and mythology of the king, obtained a location.”54 Royal power and political centralization gained a local habitation and a name in a building that was at once a “shrine-church, royal burial church, coronation church,” and “home of parliaments.”55 Westminster Abbey has a unique place in the ritual life of an English monarch – the place of both coronation and burial – but Henry IV gained a third crucial tie to the abbey by dying there. Holinshed tells how Henry IV “was taken with his last sicknesse, while he was making his praiers at saint Edward’s shrine, there as it were to take his leaue, and so to proceed foorth on his iournie.”56 Henry was praying for the success of his journey to Jerusalem at the shrine of Edward the Confessor: England’s sainted king, the founder of Westminster Abbey, and a royal who – just like Shakespeare’s Henry IV – had failed to fulfill his

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vow to take a pilgrimage. The pope absolved Edward of his promised pilgrimage to Rome on the condition that he build Westminster Abbey, and so this new royal abbey was “born as an ex voto, a relic of Edward’s decision not to make a pilgrimage to Rome. Its construction was a surrogate journey.”57 Henry IV’s death in the abbey is, likewise, another surrogate royal journey. But while to its founders Westminster Abby was an English Rome, in 2 Henry IV it becomes an English Jerusalem. The Jerusalem Chamber was, historically, merely a chamber in the abbot’s lodgings; but Shakespeare’s post-Reformation play reorientates London’s sacred center (like the teleology of the two unfulfilled royal pilgrimages) from Rome to Jerusalem. Historically, Henry IV contemplated a crusade, not a pilgrimage; in Holinshed it is “a voyage which he meant to make into the holie land, there to recouer the citie of Ierusalem from the Infidels.”58 In the chronicles, as mentioned earlier, there is also no connection between this military endeavor, contemplated at the close of Henry’s reign, and the death of Richard II with which the reign began. But for Shakespeare the journey to Jerusalem is the direct result of Henry’s guilt for Richard’s death. The journey is therefore linked with the tradition of penitential pilgrimages, which were often undertaken for particularly notorious crimes (such as that imposed on Henry II for Becket’s murder). While Shakespeare follows the first half of Holinshed’s sentence closely – “I’ll make a voyage to the Holy Land” – the second half is replaced with the words: “to wash this blood off from my guilty hand” (Richard II, 5.6.49–50). At the end of Richard II Henry imagines undertaking an expiatory pilgrimage, and while (in keeping with the chronicles) this morphs into a crusade from 1 Henry IV onwards, the language of pilgrimage remains. Crusaders, indeed, often considered themselves pilgrims,59 and Henry IV speaks of his desire for Jerusalem in terms that evoke traditional pilgrimage accounts: those holy fields Over whose acres walked those blessèd feet Which fourteen hundred years ago were nailed For our advantage to the bitter cross. (1 Henry IV, 1.1.24–7)

The synecdoche of Henry IV’s focus on Christ’s feet compresses the theology of Incarnation, Crucifixion, and Salvation into three lines with powerful dramatic economy. This slightly surprising emphasis on feet, however, has a biblical origin – “how beautiful upon the mountains are the

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feet” (Isaiah 52:7) – and Henry’s focus on Christ’s “blessèd feet” is strikingly reminiscent of pilgrim texts which regularly imagine the holy land as incandescent with Christ’s footprints. The opening sentence of The Book of Sir John Mandeville (the most popular of all pilgrim narratives and one which was regularly printed in the late sixteenth century) avows that the holy land is sacred because God had chosen “to envyroun that lond with his blesside feet.”60 (It is also noticeable that Edward the Confessor’s shrine in Westminster Abbey – the shrine where Henry IV was praying as he was taken ill – contained, as one of its most precious relics, a stone from the holy land carrying the imprint of Christ’s foot.61) In the Henriad, however, Shakespeare inflects the king’s desired pilgrimage – a historically accurate spiritual desire of a medieval monarch – with the early modern skepticism of place pilgrimage. Pilgrimage was officially abolished in England by the Second Royal Injunctions of Henry VIII in 1538, and place pilgrimage was treated with extreme distrust in Elizabethan England. But pilgrimage had always been about more than a literal journey. The epistle to the Hebrews (in what was to become one of the New Testament’s most influential metaphors) speaks of all holy living as pilgrimage: “these al died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seene them a farre off, and were perswaded of them, and embraced them, and confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth” (Hebrews 11:13). Dee Dyas has charted the way in which, even in medieval texts, there is a high degree of skepticism over the importance of place pilgrimage in the wider scheme of the spiritual pilgrimage of a Christian life.62 One of the consequences of the suppression of place pilgrimage at the Reformation was, unexpectedly, that pilgrimage became an even more vibrant cultural metaphor;63 and at the end of 2 Henry IV Warwick declares not that Henry IV has died, but (using this underlying metaphor of life as a pilgrimage) that “he’s walked the way of nature” (5.2.4). And it is a “walk” that has ended at “Jerusalem.” In Shakespeare’s 2 Henry IV, in distinction to the chronicles, Henry IV’s own end takes place when he is taken ill in the Jerusalem Chamber itself: king henry Doth any name particular belong Unto the lodging where I first did swoon? warwick ’Tis called Jerusalem, my noble lord. king henry Laud be to God! Even there my life must end. It hath been prophesied to me many years I should not die but in Jerusalem, Which vainly I supposed the Holy Land; But bear me to that chamber; there I’ll lie; (4.3.360–8) In that Jerusalem shall Harry die.

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The order of events is slightly different in Holinshed. There, the king is taken ill as he praying by Edward’s shrine: He was so suddenlie and greeuouslie taken, that such as were about him, feared least he would haue died presentlie, wherefore to releeue him (if it were possible) they bare him into a chamber that was next at hand, belonging to the abbat of Westminster, where they laid him on a pallet before the fire, and vsed all remedies to reuiue him. At length, he recouered his speech, and vnderstanding and perceiuing himselfe in a strange place which he knew not, he willed to know if the chamber had anie particular name, wherevnto answer was made, that it was called Ierusalem. Then said the king; “Lauds be giuen to the father of heauen, for now I know that I shall die here in this chamber, according to the prophesie of me declared, that I should depart this life in Ierusalem.” (3.57–8)

Shakespeare has changed a natural question (“Where am I?”) into an unnatural one (“Where was I when I was first taken ill?”); it is the price he is willing to pay in order to give his king agency over his place of death. While in the chronicles Henry IV is carried insensible into the Jerusalem Chamber, in Shakespeare he returns there by his own command. Henry IV’s choice to die in the English Jerusalem – “In that Jerusalem shall Harry die” – is a verification of England’s status. As he finally understands the prophecy he perceives it not as a trick, but a kind of affirmation: his final sentence, and his own choice over the place of his death, express a confidence in an English Jerusalem. Stow presents Henry IV’s crusade to retake Jerusalem as the result of his unifying of his land: “This yeare after the great and fortunate chaunces happened to Kyng Henry, beyng deliuered of all ciuile diuision and discention, he mynded to make a voiage agaynst the infidels, and especially for the recouery of Ierusalem.”64 The Henriad, likewise, continually makes this connection between the journey to Jerusalem and national unity: “And were these inward wars once out of hand, / We would, dear lords, unto the Holy Land” (2 Henry IV, 3.1.102–3). Once “this debate that bleedeth at our doors” is concluded, England’s soldiers will finally “draw no swords but what are sanctified” (2 Henry IV, 4.3.2, 4). Jerusalem – both the real place and the imagined perfection – requires national unity to be reached. It stands for a state of being which is politically, as it is geographically, distant throughout Henry IV. But by the end of Henry V this unity will have been achieved. In the fields of France Henry fights victoriously with captains drawn from all quarters of his kingdom. The Welsh captain Fluellen, the English captain Gower, the

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Irish captain Macmorris, and the Scottish captain Jamy unite against the French in an explicit symbol that Britain is unified once more. Henry celebrates his victory on the fields of Agincourt by attributing it entirely to divine agency (“O God, thy arm was here, / And not to us, but to thy arm alone, / Ascribe we all” [4.8.100–2]), and by celebrating it liturgically: “Do we all holy rites: / Let there be sung Non nobis and Te Deum” (4.8. 116–7). Te Deum refers to a Prayer Book canticle (a hymn of thanksgiving at Morning Prayer), and Non nobis refers to Psalm 115: “Not vnto vs, O lord, not vnto vs, but vnto thy Name giue the prayse.” In Stow’s account of Henry IV’s death, this is the psalm he speaks as he lies dying in the Jerusalem Chamber, advising his son: “And in thy selfe eschew al vaineglorie and elation of heart, following the holesome counsell of the Psalmist, (which sayeth) Non nobis Domine non nobis, sed nomini tuo da gloriam (which is to say) Not vnto vs Lord, not vnto vs, but to thy holy name be giuen laude and praise.”65 Biblical echoes (as well as the Machiavellian advice that Henry should “busy giddy minds / With foreign quarrels” [2 Henry IV, 4.3.341–2]) show the extent to which the victory at Agincourt is thematically tied to the death in the Jerusalem Chamber. The Agincourt victory is preceded by Henry V’s prayer in which (like a good medieval monarch) he relates all the actions he has taken to expiate his father’s sin, and (like a good Protestant hero) acknowledges that none of these actions have merit: Not today, O Lord, O not today, think not upon the fault My father made in compassing the crown. I Richard’s body have interrèd new, And on it have bestowed more contrite tears Than from it issued forcèd drops of blood. Five hundred poor I have in yearly pay Who twice a day their withered hands hold up Toward heaven to pardon blood. And I have built Two chantries, where the sad and solemn priests Sing still for Richard’s soul. More will I do, Though all that I can do is nothing worth, Since that my penitence comes after all, (Henry V, 4.1.274–87) Imploring pardon.

Westminster Abbey returns here as Henry reminds God that he has new interred Richard II’s bones in its royal mausoleum. But this is not the only religious center in London to which Henry draws attention. John Stow’s London-centered Summarie of Englyshe Chronicles (1565) – to which he has

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“dyligentely” added “the names and yeares of all the Baylyffes, Customs, maiors, and sheriffs of the Citie of London” – concludes the account of Henry V’s reign with the words: “He buylded the Shene and Sion, and lyeth buried at westmynster.”66 The “two chantries” that Henry V mentions as he asks God to grant him victory are the evocatively named religious houses of Bethlehem (at Sheen) and Sion. Henry has, literally, built Sion in his land. Just as there is no historical link between Henry IV’s putative journey to Jerusalem and Richard’s murder, it appears to be Shakespeare’s invention to connect Sion’s foundation with the expiation of the guilt of Richard’s death. In both cases – the journey to Jerusalem and the building of “Sion” in London – the Henriad creates a nonhistorical link between the holy city and the cleansing of royal guilt. The double stain of Richard’s murder – “upon my head and all this famous land” – was one that Bolingbroke had hoped to redress by his pilgrimage: “I’ll make a voyage to the Holy Land, / To wash this blood off from my guilty hand” (Richard II, 5.6.36, 49–50). The expiation which Henry IV failed to achieve, however, has been achieved by his son as the nation is unified on the fields of Agincourt. The death in the Jerusalem Chamber opens up the resonant possibility that England will become a holy, united nation.

“Our Jerusalem” At the beginning of his translation of The Solace of Sion, and Ioy of Iervsalem (1587), Richard Robinson (“citizen of London”) placed an image of the arms of the City of London surrounded by words from the Psalms: “Ps.101. Annuncietur in Sion nomen Domini & laus ei[u]s in Ierusalem vers. 26,” that is, “Citizen of London. Psalm 101. The name of the Lord is made known in Sion, and his praise in Jerusalem verse 26.”67 The visual context of the biblical quotation transforms London into Sion, for it is in London that the name of the Lord is made known through the preaching of the gospel, and the psalm promises that where God is praised, there is Sion. England’s capital is reimagined as Jerusalem and the square design of the image echoes Revelation’s vision of “the heauenly Hierusalem” as “foure square” (21.16). Shakespeare’s audience members were used to thinking of themselves as living out the call to inhabit the new Jerusalem. As they watched England’s king dying in London’s Jerusalem Chamber, a typological reading of the moment would, as this chapter has argued, have been legible to them. Although critics have concentrated on Henry IV’s sense of the irony of his

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end, another reading of the moment is enabled by Henry’s glorifying of God at this moment – “Laud be to God” – and by the resonant agency of his final couplet: “But bear me to that chamber; there I’ll lie; / In that Jerusalem shall Harry die” (emphasis mine). The sixteenth-century Protestant exegetical practice of reading contemporary lives typologically is echoed in Henry IV’s choice to die in the Jerusalem Chamber. The biblical meaning of Jerusalem, and the typological hope that London would inherit the mantle of the new Jerusalem, meant that the obvious ironic failure of Henry’s death is likely to have been balanced, for an early modern audience, by the possibility that it points toward England’s sacred, and united, future.

chapter 6

Discontented Harmonies: Words against Words in Pomfret Castle Tom Bishop

To recover a fuller sense of reading sacred text in early modern England, one that might touch Shakespeare’s experience of it, we must expand enormously our usual sense of what informs “reading.” For by the time a child or an adult learned and began to practice it, the formal act of reading the Bible – decoding printed marks on paper – was already preceded by a long series of layered encounters with the same or variant words. Bible “reading” in the period was only one, and by no means necessarily the most influential, of the ways of encountering the power, authority, and vividness of Scripture. The Word presented itself in visual forms such as painting and sculpture, even in the comparatively iconophobic Elizabethan Church. It was heard, recited, intoned, and sung in religious services and in private prayers; it was inculcated in catechisms, redacted and epitomized in popular ballads, songs, and stage-plays. It was memorized actively by rote or passively by osmosis in large swathes, sequentially or piecemeal. It was even inhabited in the architecture of churches and cathedrals. For many key passages, a reader might have several versions competing in their head: the Coverdale Psalms from the Prayer Book, the Sternhold and Hopkins metrical versions from hymnsinging, the Bishops’ Bible text from church readings, the Geneva version in their pocket – to say nothing of other local adaptations that might have caught a reader’s attention in one way or another. What James Kugel has called “the interpreted Bible,” from this point of view, could go all the way down into the very earliest layers of a reader’s encounter not merely with text, but almost with language itself.1 The period’s deployment of the word “read” suggests both the stakes and the richness of its range of meaning, a range exploited and unfolded programmatically, for instance, in Spenser’s multiplication of the term read/rede/reed/aread/etc. in The Faerie Queene.2 Such reading moves not merely from text to reader, but back and forth in a constant circulation, its text in many dimensions, not linear or simply transactive, but rather folded, 103

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layered, plicated. In this, reading matches and corresponds to the texture of Christian Scripture itself as irreducibly leading in several directions – irreducibly and, as the history of Christianity suggests, often uncontrollably. For notwithstanding the opening exhortation of the 1599 Geneva Bible to read “but with a single eye,” an eye brought to Scripture is unlikely to persist in singleness for long without careful and sustained discipline.3 Indeed, in spite of this admonition, singleness hardly persists in the Geneva Bible itself. The Geneva margin refers readers to Matthew 6:22: “The light of the body is the eye: if then thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be light.” The verse in Matthew is adorned both with a pilcrow and an asterisk, telling us that it is doubly a notable “quotation” and one of the “principal matters” of the text. But it also sports a small injected “p” that codes a further marginal annotation (“If thine eye be disposed to liberality”) that in turn sends readers to Proverbs 22:9 (“He that hath a good eye, he shall be blessed: for he giveth of his bread unto the poor”), which is also further glossed. We might well wonder how reading conducted with “a single eye” squares with an eye “disposed to liberality” and sent on such a roundabout journey. The one seems to bespeak a disciplined unity of some kind, the other to foster rather a disseminating expansiveness. And these assistances are offered, say the Geneva Bible’s editors, because of “how hard a thing it is to understand the holy scriptures, and what errors, sects, and heresies grow daily for lack of the true knowledge thereof, and how many are discouraged (as they pretend) because they cannot attain to the true and simple meaning of the same.”4 A “reader” of the Bible around 1600 was variously involved in networks of textual and embodied relations that extended, as it were, through both the text being read and the reader reading that text. Within the text, any moment of Scripture might reach out into a web of cross-references, echoes, and anticipations, further prolonged, amplified, and ramified through glosses, marginalia, footnotes, and other paratexts. Within the reader, the act of reading might make contact with multiple moments of an embodied history of living as a reader (or hearer or other sensor) in a world saturated by Biblicism. And each of these complex imbrications – of the reader and the read – might also figure, resemble, or decode the other. In the Elizabethan world, to adapt Derrida’s formulation, “il n’y a pas de hors-Bible.”5 Amidst such fruitfulness of relation (and a fruitful text was always a hermeneutic and devotional goal), the counterenergy of discipline, though constantly reimposed, might just as constantly fail. The question springing from this state of affairs for the study of early modern English imaginative literature is what sort of creative responses

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might be generated by a feeling for such textual productivity. For if a saturated text such as the Bible can be interpreted variously, it can also be lived in a variety of ways, and it seems as fruitful to ask of a lived Bible how it comes to inhabit the texts of imagination as it does of an interpreted one. The Faerie Queene, positioning itself so deliberately from the outset of Book One’s Legend of Holiness as developing biblical paradigms of both promise and deferral, is one notable answer. But for all its magnificence, the leisure of Spenser’s great poem – its willingness to let things play out – denies it some intensity and pressure. Nothing except the reader’s own commitment compels The Faerie Queene forward; it is written for the long haul – a work, as it says itself, of reading and interpreting, of endless indirections. But a play script, even at its most digressive, is compelled instead to propulsion, density, and embodiment. The necessary fiction that its words are spoken in a shifting and immediate present allows us to monitor the stratigraphy and texture of that present as a version of experience itself, as it comes at us willy-nilly, and hence to weigh what roles the Bible may play in shaping that experience as it comes. The dramatic, that is, has a density of “livedness” that a text read at leisure does not. It can present speaking within a world inhabited by the biblical text, and demonstrate the ways that text discloses itself within and through an act or utterance. Here, I can offer only one example of this process, in a single speech – albeit an unusually rich one – from the history play, Richard II. Imprisoned alone in Pomfret Castle, Richard of Bordeaux, no longer King Richard II, passes his time, he tells us, “studying.”6 It is a complex and slightly odd word, with an air of combining the casual with the concerted, as though he has just looked up and noticed the presence of the audience he then proceeds to deny. Most of the senses of “study” recorded under headings I and II in the OED seem to apply: “to strive or aim,” “set one’s mind on,” “endeavour,” “think, ponder,” “be perplexed,” “debate with oneself,” “exercise ones’ mind on,” “brood on,” etc. Attention is thrown by this word onto the mental activity of working through, casting about, giving sustained attention. Richard’s latest study takes up a specific mental and rhetorical task, almost like a formal assignment: “how I may compare / This prison where I live unto the world” (5.5.1–2). The insouciance of his tone belies the constraint of his situation. He is having trouble, he says, “because the world is populous / And here is not a creature but myself” (5.5.3–4), at once invoking the audience and putting it aside or refiguring it as absent or uncreated, dispersoned in some way – as actors typically do. His hearers are

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both there and not there, listeners being appealed to and absences that still tremble on the edge of being recognized. Can they hear him? Could he know that they hear him? Who else might be listening? We will see that this comes to matter. As Richard speaks, the sense of his location seems to fluctuate. Narratively, “this prison where I live” is Pomfret Castle – where we have been told he is going in his previous scene (5.1). Richard evokes the solidity of his dungeon in “the flinty ribs” of “my ragged prison walls” through which his “thoughts tending to ambition” imagine his “weak nails” might “tear a passage” (5.5.19–21). But at the same time, a metadramatic element in his address places him in a live and present theatre, a “populous” place repeatedly imagined in the period as “the world” and containing an assortment of people of distinctly various “humours like the people of this world.” Indeed, not merely “like” them, but concretely and disparately them, ranged as groundlings, seat-holders, occupants of lords’ rooms, and so on. Yet those very people immediately watching Richard are at the same time translated into figures in a third location: the personified “thoughts” in Richard’s head, a kind of internal fair field full of folk, of “many people” crammed “in one person” (5.5.31). Prison, theater, head: the imagined site of speaking shifts in a mutual extrapolation related to the similar layered flickering of Richard-as-actor and Richard-as-character in the immediate present of audience and performer. There is thus a considerable pressure of the figurative on the scene, but without a dominant referent, and this shadowy tremolo marks a significant deepening of the texture of utterance for a Shakespearean character. The invocation of an internal head-theater is also prefigured in the play in Richard’s evocation of Death’s court in “the hollow crown / That rounds the mortal temples of a king” – a crown at first skull and coronet, then inflated to a “castle wall” pierced with “a little pin” (3.2. 160–9). In this frame, the “flinty ribs” (5.5.20) of Pomfret are more like Richard’s own too too solid ribs, likewise resistant to tearing, from within or without. If he cannot escape his prison by outward violence, perhaps it can be turned inward, on the prison of himself. Thus, though it begins by positing a simple comparison of prison to world as a studied “topic of invention,” the speech rapidly develops a sense that managing its referents is quite tricky. Is the audience to take itself as within or without the world of Richard’s thoughts? The progress of “studying” seems rapidly to become a round of substitutions figured eventually in the turning on itself of Richard’s own language: “nor I nor any man that but man is / With nothing shall be pleased, till he

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be eased / With being nothing” (5.5.39–41). Chiasmus becomes both circulation and enclosure, with Richard at once container and contained. In the midst of the speech, Richard abruptly presents the method of this “studying” more concretely, not merely as the concerted directedness of a mental effort, but as grounded in the specific textual practice of scriptural commentary and exegesis via the juxtaposition of gospel texts. Speaking of how “the better sort” – of people, of his thoughts – are “intermixed with scruples,” he describes a tendency to “set the word itself / Against the word” (5.5.11–14), exemplifying this method with two paraphrases from the synoptic gospels – Mark 10:13–15 and 10:23–6, on heaven’s availability to “little children” and its unavailability to “a rich man,” respectively.7 Further, there is an intriguing lacuna in Richard’s selection of texts. The intervening episode in all three synoptic gospels, between the children who are invited to heaven and the camel who can’t progress, concerns a rich man (or in Luke, more pointedly, “a certain ruler”) whom Jesus exhorted to sell all he had and give to the poor. The omission, or suppression, of this man from Richard’s meditation suggests the suspicion he may be a worrying figure of the speaker himself; both might ask, “Good Master, what shall I do that I may inherit eternal life?” (Mark 10:17). Scripture that does not appear, if its nonappearance is pointed enough, can be as significant as text that does. Something complex is going on at this moment of citation which it is worth pausing over. In addition to the missing gospel questioner, there may also be some missing text. At the least, there is a metrical omission or gap – a half line, which may mark a pause in thought or even some deliberate omission of earlier text. In all the early published texts of the play, beginning with Q1 (1597), the line is crowded, continuously printed, and metrically awkward: “Against the word,as thus:Come little ones, & then againe” (Q1, sig. I3v). Modern editions tend, reasonably, to insert a line-break after “word” or “ones” and some to hypothesize that something has dropped out at some point, leaving a defect that has been poorly spliced.8 There are yet further wrinkles clustering around these lines. For one, the explicit formulation of a practice that aims to “set the word itself / Against the word” seems to have caused some anxiety somewhere, so that the presence of the word itself, both as word and as subject of a potentially perplexing or wrangling “study,” came to be silenced. In the 1623 Folio text (followed by Q6 [1634]), the line – but not the defective metrical layout – is changed to:

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tom bishop do set the Faith it selfe Against the Faith: as thus: Come little ones: & then again,9

What the motive for this change was is unknown, but it points again to a turbulence around this word-against-word practice which we might do well to pay attention to. The other peculiarity is the specific pre-emption (as with the “hollow crown” passage) of this verbal formulation by another passage from two scenes earlier, in the comic battle waged between York and his wife over King Henry’s pardon of Aumerle. In the course of their dispute, the duchess calls her husband “my hard-hearted lord, / That sets the word itself against the word” (5.3.120–1) for inviting the king to substitute French refusal for English forgiveness in the word “pardon.” Here, rather than two texts, two semantic ranges of a single word are made to collide. The duchess’s objection, though, has the air of a joke being executed precisely against a regular form of words of a more dignified sort, as though it expected comic recognition of her redeployment of a more serious practice, such as that later exemplified by Richard. We have seen that the text of almost any early modern English Bible was rife with just such instances of setting the word against the word in the more neutral (if it can ever be neutral) sense of juxtaposing scriptural texts exegetically, in order to weave the fabric of the whole more tightly. Even the otherwise reticent King James Bible (1611) continued this practice, while stripping away the established tradition of including controversial and polemic glosses and annotations. In the case of the gospels, however, there was an even more concerted tradition of collocation and reconciliation in the ancient and ongoing practice of “harmonization,” which bears some consideration as part of what may be included in the notion of setting the word against the word.10 For the core of the New Testament is, from the point of view of simplicity, inconvenient: there are four canonical testimonies to the life and passion of Christ. Three “synoptic” gospels are at least broadly centripetal, forming a center of gravity on which the planet John exerts its eccentric influence. But even the trio have significant and only partially reconcilable variations among them, and this variability has troubled Christians since the very young days of the Church. Augustine was aware of a need to defend Scripture from the attacks of pagan critics on this ground. He discussed the problem in De Consensu Evangelistarum (c. 400–405 CE), undertaken, as he says

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to demonstrate the error or the temerity of those who judge themselves able to prefer the quite subtle charges against the four separate gospel books written by the four evangelists. And to do that, we must show that the same four writers do not contradict each other. For as the primary ground of their emptiness, they tend to object this: that those same evangelists give different accounts among themselves.11

Augustine’s strategies for reducing this disharmony were subtle and lastingly influential: he drew distinctions of viewpoint among the four gospels in terms of the emphasis of each evangelist, with Matthew focusing on royalty, Mark on humanity, Luke on priesthood, and John on divinity.12 In doing so, though not himself directly participating in it, Augustine drew on, endorsed, and provided theoretical support for an established tradition of conflations and gospel harmonization going back at least as early as the late second century, as evidenced in Justin Martyr and especially in Tatian’s influential Diatessaron (c. 160 CE), and including later contributions by Ammonius of Alexandria (c. 220) and Eusebius of Caesarea (c. 320), who attempted to resolve glaring chronological discrepancies between the synoptic gospels and John.13 Harmonization, however, is not a straightforward project, since there are varieties of discrepancy and they can be handled in different ways. Variant details can be suppressed in favor of alternative wording to form a single unified narrative (“radical harmonization”), additional details can be spliced into a base text to form a comprehensive conflated version (“synthetic harmonization”), intact competing versions of passages or incidents can simply be presented seriatim in a continuous account (“sequential harmonizing”), or variant texts can be presented side-by-side for ready comparison (“parallel harmonization”).14 The harmonization project continued through the intervening centuries, including a significant Middle English example, “Oon of Foure,” translated from the twelfth-century Latin harmony of Clement of Llanthony and disseminated late in the reign of Richard II, before the Arundel Constitutions constricted vernacular texts of the Bible as implicitly heretical.15 But the Reformation, with its vernacular promulgations and fierce textual controversies, saw a significant expansion of harmonies; several influential new ones appeared in the sixteenth century in what became in effect a Reform-wide effort (including Catholic Reform). By 1600, versions of all of these solutions were freely available and circulating in early modern Europe, and were part of the play of voices that anyone contemplating the situation and resonance of Scripture had to be aware of.

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Two examples of this cultural project are worth citing. The first was produced by the Lutheran scholar Andreas Osiander, entitled Four books of a gospel harmony, in which the gospel story is woven together from the four gospels into one in such a way that no word of any one is omitted, nothing foreign is introduced, the order of none disturbed, nothing does not appear in its place; the whole indeed with letters and notes made distinct so that you can at once understand what is proper to each gospel, and what is in common with others and with which ones.16

First printed in Basel in 1537 (and again in Paris in 1545), Osiander’s work opens with a lengthy and fulsome prefatory letter presenting and explaining the work to his niece’s husband, the “Reverendissimo in Christo Patri ac Domino Thomae Cranamero Archiepiscopo Cantuariensi totiusque Angliae primati, etc.” Osiander’s harmony is a single narrative compilation of the four gospels, a combination of synthetic and, where synthesis was impossible, sequential harmonization, with marginal annotations of sources being conflated and of variations in wording throughout. An analytic index provides a guide to the location of each section of the gospel sources. Thus, for instance, the famous opening chapter of John is recorded in the index as D I and inserted into the sequential narrative of the harmony as “Book 1 Chapter XV,” after the blended synoptic accounts of the Nativity. Even the relatively simple and congruent passages Richard cites in his Pomfret speech, which appear in Book 3, Chapter 28,17 are copiously adorned with inventive diacritical marks cross-referencing tiny variations of wording. Osiander’s harmony is composed in order to show that the gospels can be comprehended as a unity and, despite the scrupulous assurance of its title page that nothing is omitted, there is a certain necessary machinery of differential emphasis at work in the critical apparatus of center and margin. Another strategy is adopted in the synoptic gospel harmony commentary of John Calvin, first published in 1555 in Latin and issued in London in 1584 as A Harmonie upon the Three Evangelists, Matthew, Mark and Luke, with the Commentarie of M. John Calvin: Faithfullie translated out of Latine into English, by E[usebius].P[aget].18 This volume presents a parallel harmony of three English texts of Matthew, Mark, and Luke (presumably compiled by Paget himself) in three columns across the top of the page, arranged to match Calvin’s commentary across the bottom, keyed to the verse number and text above. Calvin works his way methodically through a unified synoptic gospel narrative, remarking on differences among the gospel texts. Thus,

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for the analogy of a rich man to a camel, Calvin’s text (attached to Matthew 19:24) offers that “Mark assuageth the sharpness of the saying, while he applieth it only to them which put their trust in riches.”19 He goes on further to expound the text and its moral lessons for rich and poor alike in a standard way, adding a brief exegesis of the simile of the camel which “amplifieth the difficulty: for it declareth that rich men do swell, and are more puffed up with pride and vain boldness, so that they cannot suffer themselves to be brought into such straits, as God doth keep his children.”20 The latter point clearly connects this gospel passage to the earlier one about the sufferance of little children, which forms the other text of Richard’s Pomfret study. Before leaving the passage, Calvin adds a linguistic point, opining that “I think that by this word Camel is rather noted a great rope for a ship then a beast.”21 We will return to this point. The different harmonies of Osiander and Calvin exemplify the renewed liveliness in Shakespeare’s day of the ancient project of setting “the word itself against the word” for the purpose of clarification and exposition.22 But though this is an important context, Richard’s study perplexes him with a still stronger sense of “setting against,” one where variant texts are not merely alongside but in opposition to one another. For it is clear that what concerns him here, and perhaps throughout the speech, is the contradiction around the question “what shall I do to inherit eternal life.” Is Richard a “little one,” in the sense that all the pure of heart are so, and therefore are welcome to the kingdom of heaven, or is he a “rich man” whose transit into bliss is next to impossible? The problem of collocating texts whose implications were or might be made contradictory also had both a long history and a contemporary resonance. Exegesis struggled with, and sometimes flaunted, such collocations as an established homiletic or commentary technique,23 and the project of harmonization likewise tends to bring specific difficulties to the fore – for instance in showing differing gospel testimonies as to the last words of Jesus. But the back-and-forth weaving of disparate texts to form overarching theological concepts in general inevitably leads to tensions that must be sorted out by interpretive intervention.24 Such larger issues were sufficiently grave, particularly in the controversial environment of the Reformation, that they could give rise to specific language regulating hermeneutic tension. In the English church, a canon answering this purpose was drafted by Thomas Cranmer and eventually adopted as Article 20 (“Of the Authority of the Church”) of the Thirty-Nine Articles, enacted in its English version as:

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tom bishop The Church hath power to decree rites or ceremonies and authority in controversies of faith; and yet it is not lawful for the Church to ordain anything contrary to God’s word written, neither may it so expound one place of Scripture, that it be repugnant to another. Wherefore, although the Church be a witness and a keeper of Holy Writ: yet, as it ought not to decree anything against the same, so besides the same ought it not to enforce anything to be believed for necessity of salvation.25

This article specifically attempts to regulate and limit the practice and effect of setting “word against word” in the way Richard is doing – that is, in order to make or with the effect of making collocated texts “repugnant to one another” (“unum Scripturae locum sic exponere . . . ut alteri contradicat,” in the Latin version of the Articles). It is remarkable that Cranmer’s formulation, in laying out what the church’s authority is to be, apparently speaks as one who is, as it were, its own internal critic, one who imagines how the church might well come to be in breach of its responsibility to maintain the unity and coherence of Scripture and instead begin tearing at that unity in its interpretive practice. Indeed, so eager was Cranmer to limit the authority that the church rightly exercises, as “a witness and a keeper,” over the interpretation and implementation of scripturally justified doctrine that Elizabeth felt the need to step in and reassert, in the added opening clause not part of Cranmer’s draft, a positive role for the Church. Notably also, the article gives no guidance as to how the Church, or some other authority, is to determine that the Church has violated this article, or what to do about it if it has. And yet repugnancy seems to be a threat that lies all too easily and dangerously at the heart of the Church’s mission to manage the meanings of Scripture, since, as the preceding Article XIX asserts, “As the Church of Jerusalem, Alexandria and Antioch hath erred: so also the Church of Rome hath erred, not only in their living and manner of ceremonies, but also in matters of faith.” And if they have erred, how much the more we? Anyone offering to interpret Scripture by setting the word against the word had better be on guard against advertently or inadvertently creating such repugnancy. And any repugnancy, once created, necessitates concerted and sometimes severe labor to resolve it. We have been looking at instances of collocating words, as it were, “extensively” – taking them from one place and putting them alongside words from another place. But there are also instances where the proliferability of words against words also unfolds “intensively.” Gospel words – perhaps all words – are persistently unstable in relation to themselves, not merely to others. And Richard’s citation of the gospels also includes a remarkable instance of this. For no sooner does Richard begin citing

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the text of the word than a further refinement of setting it repugnantly against itself appears: as thus: “Come, little ones”; And then again: “It is as hard to come as for a camel To thread the postern of a small needle’s eye.” (5.5.14–17)

The last line is aggressively metaphorical, combining in imagination a camel, a thread, the eye of a needle, and the small gate of a castle wall, so that the camel shrinks or the eye grows.26 There is a psychological aptness to this metaphorical resizing, of course, given that Richard, as a former rich man, might well wish to get the camel through the needle’s eye by any possible means, including such catachresis. As it happens, Richard’s choice of double metaphors precisely recapitulates the glossings of this verse in exegetical history that also answer to just this anxiety. From fairly early times, Jesus’s difficult paradox of camel and needle was rubbed and softened by commentators, and two prominent solutions came to be especially favored. The first substituted (or perhaps even invented) a late Greek word “kamilos,” meaning “a rope,” which, if difficult to get through a needle’s eye, is at least a conceptually cognate task. This simple verbal replacement (in a Greek that would already have levelled pronunciation of the two words) is found in some later manuscripts, and is endorsed by several commentators, among them Calvin in his harmony gloss. The second solution, ascribed erroneously to Anselm by Aquinas in his Catena Aurea but also appearing elsewhere, invented a nonexistent small gate called “The Needle’s Eye” in the wall of Jerusalem, through which an unloaded camel might pass with difficulty.27 Both of these interpretations were available to Shakespeare (as W. L. Edgerton argued and Brian Cummings confirmed), the first directly in the Geneva Bible glosses and the second implicit in Erasmus’s Paraphrases, copies of which were ordered to be placed in Elizabethan parish churches.28 The significant point is not so much that Shakespeare knew them, but that he deliberately chose to foreground that knowledge and to compound them into Richard’s tense formulation, upping the stakes even further by adding the detail of the “small needle’s eye.”29 This has the effect of pointing squarely to the history of anxious discussion for anyone acquainted with the complexity of glossing this passage. Even a single word (“camel” or “eye”) may contain cross-tensions that effectively set it against itself.

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The various strategies described so far are all quite overt, and can be thought through in terms of the availability of the content of Richard’s speech to patterns and practices of scriptural exegesis and commentary. But there is another possible sedimentation of Richard’s words over the Word in the speech, more difficult and elusive and therefore necessarily more speculative. Since this identification depends on invocation of what is not present directly in the speech, it is open to the charge of being simply made up or imagined. Yet, since poetry can emerge as much from what is blocked or set aside as from what is open, it seems at least worth asking the question.30 Of course there are infinitely many things that are not present in Richard’s speech, so this must necessarily be only a relative absence. Allusion, even negative allusion, must have something to hang itself on. The field to search in is nonetheless clearly suggested by the presence of Scripture as occasion and subject in the speech, and by the general richness and pervasiveness of biblical allusion of various types in the play at large.31 To approach such a register of, as it were, allusion by absence in the speech, consider again the resonance of Richard’s meditating on and speaking of the action of “my brain” and “my soul” in “this prison where I live” – a prison strangely open to the observation of “many people.” Earlier I noted that the site of figurative application of “this prison where I live” seems to synthesize or oscillate between Pomfret dungeon, the theater where the actor stands, and the body of Richard himself with its “flinty ribs” and “hollow crown.” It is a space both empty and crowded, full of versions of Richard (“yet none contented”) and yet too much aware of its incipient evacuation into “nothing.” Compare it now with another prison lamentation: O unhappy and wretched creature that I am, who will delyuer mee from the torment of this earthly body? [marginal note Rom. 7] Beholde the lamentation of the silly soule, which would fayne bee discharged out of prison. Whereof the Psalmist sayth thus. [marginal note Psalm 141] O Lorde bring my soule out of captiuitie. There is no rest nor quietnesse in anye place heere in this world. Nowhere is there founde any peace or securitie: Feare and trembling is euerye where, labour and griefe is in all places. The fleshe is alwayes in labour, griefe, and sorow, so long as it liueth, and the soule doth mourne and lament hir greeuous estate and being.

This might seem standard homiletic fare, but there is nonetheless a network of relations teasingly similar to the mood, content, and direction of Richard’s speech. The passage is the whole of Chapter 18, entitled “The lamentation of the soul being in prison,” from The Mirror of Man’s

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Life, plainly describing what weak mould we are made of, what miseries we are subject unto, how uncertain this life is, and what shall be our end.32 A successful work of popular spirituality, this is in turn a translation, “Englished by H. Kirton,” of Innocent III’s De contemptu mundi.33 I am not claiming Shakespeare was in any strong sense “alluding to” this in Richard’s monologue, though it seems not unlikely he would have read such a popular work. But given the associative similarities, it seems worth exploring further the texts which form part of its network. Of particular interest is its anchoring reference for the image of the soul in the body’s prison, one also present along one figurative line of Richard’s speech. Innocent derives this move from Psalm 141, specifically citing the first half of verse 8, where it appears in the Vulgate as “educ de carcere animam meam ut confiteamur nomini tuo.” In English Bibles, this is Psalm 142, rendered in the Coverdale translation as “Bring my soul out of prison, that I may give thanks unto thy Name.” Coverdale’s version is worth quoting in full in relation to Richard’s speech: 1. I cried unto the Lord with my voice: yea, even unto the Lord did I make my supplication. 2. I poured out my complaints before him: and showed him of my trouble. 3. When my spirit was in heaviness, thou knewest my path: in the way wherein I walked, have they privily laid a snare for me. 4. I looked also upon my right hand: and saw there was no man that would know me. 5. I had no place to flee unto: and no man cared for my soul. 6. I cried unto thee, O Lord, and said: thou art my hope, and my portion in the land of the living. 7. Consider my complaint: for I am brought very low. 8. O deliver me from my persecutors: for they are too strong for me. 9. Bring my soul out of prison, that I may give thanks unto thy name: which thing if thou wilt grant me, then shall the righteous resort unto my company. The psalm is titled “Voce mea ad Dominum” (its Vulgate wording) in Coverdale and hence in the Book of Common Prayer, and was, like all the Psalms, read monthly every year in the daily round of morning and evening prayer services, coupled with its successor, the “Penitential” Psalm 143, “Domine exaudi.” The latter echoes its partner, speaking of how “the enemy hath persecuted my soul; he hath smitten my life down to the

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ground; he hath laid me in the darkness, as the men that have been long dead” (143:3), and declaring that “Yet do I remember the time past” (143:5). The sense that 142 was a psalm “in prison” was variously marked in different Bibles, but generally present. The opening “title verse” of the Vulgate text reads “eruditio David cum esset in spelunca oratio.” Geneva translates this as a heading: “A Psalm of David, to give instruction, and a prayer when he was in the cave,” and adds a confirming gloss on verse seven: “For he was on all sides beset with his enemies, as though he had been in a most straight prison.” The comparison to a prison is presumably because the actual historical cross-reference led not to a formal prison but to David’s cave of refuge from Saul’s persecution recorded in 1 Samuel 22:1: “David therefore departed thence, and saved himself in the cave of Adullam” (Geneva translation). A further cross-reference to David’s sojourn in the prison-like cave refuge takes us back into Psalms when, in Psalm 57 “he fled from Saul in the cave” (“quando fugit a facie Saul in spelunca” [Vulgate 56.1]).34 This latter cave-psalm is also a song of one beset with enemies – “under the shadow of thy wings shall be my refuge, until this tyranny be overpast”(57:1) – but it also rises into confidence and resolve toward the end: “My heart is fixed, O God, my heart is fixed: I will sing and give praise. Awake up, my glory; awake, lute and harp: I myself will awake right early” (57:8–9). And this last detail along the chain of scriptural associations brings us back to a really striking and unexpected feature of Richard’s speech – its unprecedented interruption by a stage direction that “The music plays” (5.5.41), an offstage music on which Richard comments bitterly, the musician remaining unseen throughout.35 The introduction of music provides an opportunity for Richard to moralize on his own failure to maintain “the concord of my state and time” so that “I wasted time and now doth time waste me”; it is a rich and atmospheric moment in the play. But it gathers additional resonance and musicality if we allow the ways suggested above in which the context of lamentation and self-accusation, of recovered faith in God’s purpose to save the penitent supplicant, may be played on throughout specifically by not being evoked more directly. “Unkinged” Richard, that is, is not the one playing, but only commenting ironically on someone else’s music.36 In the prison of his days, he neither praises nor entreats, but, instead, he studies. He does not raise the famous cry of the psalmist “De profundis te clamavi” (129/130:1), and this is why it matters that we are encouraged to ask who is or who might be listening to his words. And from his oddly mannered detachment throughout the speech, which cites yet also sets aside or distances even those scriptural markers it directly adverts to, Shakespeare

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develops a highly original portrait of the process of Richard’s thought, a portrait, as numerous critics have remarked, powerfully generative of his own ongoing account of consciousness and subjectivity.37 The strategies for the multiplication of words in Richard’s speech explored here, exemplified in contemporary practices of putting “word against word” in the treatment of Scripture, also reach outward to networks of repetition and figuration in other parts of the play. To this extent, the development of Shakespeare’s figurative and internally allusive crossregisters explored by such critics as Wolfgang Clemen and Caroline Spurgeon might be placed in a historical framework that posits specific reading experiences, especially those of biblical reading, as a key precursor. Demonstrating this would require more extended study, but it is worth considering the extent to which the practice of “word against word,” so well developed in managing the Bible’s sprawling multiplicity, provides not only a local topic of Richard’s “study” at this late stage in the play, resulting in an arresting and innovative development of the force of soliloquy, as Cummings shows, but also a compositional method at large for managing a complete and complex action. This would include not only features of language such as cross-registers and echoes of words and phrases, but features of action such as the opening of the play in a tense scene of “my word against yours” between Bolingbroke and Mowbray, or the rain of accusations, and gages, around Aumerle that opens Act 4. At the outer edge of speculation, one might wonder whether the uniquely folded registers of scriptural reading and understanding could not be taken as a model for Shakespeare’s lifelong exploration of the likewise pleated temporality of theatrical performance itself, where the live and present figures of actors on stage absorb and repeat their antitypes of the past according to a logic governed at once by the script of the play and the pressures of the immediate moment. In any case, what Stephen Orgel has called “the notorious profligacy of Renaissance symbolic imagery” would seem also to apply to the reading, or at least to Shakespeare’s reading, of the Bible.38

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Interplay: Biblical Forms and Other Genres

chapter 7

Titus Andronicus and the Rhetoric of Lamentation Adrian Streete

The exploration of profound grief in the theater presents a series of rhetorical and ethical challenges. Can extreme emotion be represented in rational terms?1 How can utter loss be conveyed by those who remain? How can the inexpressible be expressed? Can the unbounded nature of grief ever be brought back into rational bounds? Shakespeare wrestles with these questions in one of his most intense depictions of loss: Act 3, Scene 1 of The Most Lamentable Roman Tragedy of Titus Andronicus (c. 1593). This is a scene of almost unbearable pain. It pushes to extremes what can be seen, spoken, and endured. Indeed, this scene, and the one that precedes it, remain difficult and controversial for audiences today.2 The action begins with Titus begging the Tribunes and Senators for the lives of his sons. He supplicates as a good Roman should, using the oratorical forms of the genus iudiciale to plead for mercy, but his words fall on deaf ears.3 He then endures, in quick succession, the banishment of his son Lucius, the sight of his raped and mutilated daughter Lavinia, the severing of his own hand in supposed appeasement of the Emperor Saturninus, and the gruesome delivery of his sons’ heads and his own dismembered hand. As horror piles upon horror, Titus’s language becomes increasingly figurative. Marcus finds this hard to understand: marcus O brother, speak with possibility And do not break into these deep extremes. titus Is not my sorrows deep, having no bottom? Then be my passions bottomless with them. marcus But yet let reason govern thy lament.

(3.1.215–18)4

The difficulty of this exchange is, in part, due to a clash of rhetorical traditions. Marcus dislikes Titus’s hyperbole and seems concerned about where the unregulated “lament” may lead him. Marcus expresses a Stoical belief in the ability of reason to temper the passions, using a different 121

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rhetorical and affective register to Titus. A good Roman, Marcus would prefer rhetoric to be rationally ordered: communication should proceed on the principle of properly tempered speech and response.5 Titus understands these rhetorical principles, yet as he encounters the various horrors done to his family and himself, the possibility of adhering to these Stoic maxims becomes ridiculous. In response, his rhetoric and actions become unconstrained, hyperbolic, unreasonable. And they do so by evoking the biblical book of Lamentations.6 In Lamentations and in Act 3, Scene 1 of Titus Andronicus, the audience are repeatedly asked to consider the suffering of one who either cannot attain, or else does not elicit, a response. Titus’s “Is not my sorrows deep, having no bottom?” and Lamentations’s “Behold and see, if there be any sorow [sic] like unto my sorowe” (1:12) are examples of erotesis. This is a rhetorical question that invites but does not necessarily expect an answer. Both speakers appeal to those who should otherwise reply, and both hear nothing. As John Udall notes in his 1593 commentary on Lamentations: “The heauiest plague that man can endure in this life, is to haue God to refuse to heare his prayer when he calleth vpon him in distresse.”7 The lamenting voice is characterized by the failure of others to heed it. The audience is not asked to render the act of lamentation governable through reason. It is invited to look on the speaker and to experience his disconnection from those things, past and future, that might otherwise offer him present comfort.8 The lamenter occupies the state and the tense of the present. He becomes grief itself. Critics have written illuminatingly on the presence of both Roman and biblical registers in the text. Commenting on the play’s critique of Roman models of rhetoric and pedagogy, S. Clarke Hulse convincingly shows how the legal oratory that opens the play soon “sickens and decays”: Titus has to find a “new language of action that supplants the old Roman oratory.”9 Naseeb Shaheen has detailed the play’s numerous scriptural allusions, and Eugene Giddens has noted the drama’s use of narratives from Genesis.10 Yet very little has been said on the generative interplay between the Roman rhetoric of oratory and the biblical rhetoric of lament in Titus Andronicus. I argue that in Act 3, Scene 1, Shakespeare does not try to reconcile Roman and Judeo-Christian ideas about lamentation. Rather, he translates the often competing ethical and rhetorical provocations found in classical and Christian exegetical literature into the very stuff of dramatic conflict. In considering the syncretic interplay of classical Roman, mainly Stoic rhetoric, and the biblical rhetoric of lamentation, I am thinking less in terms of a binary relationship than of a flexible, shifting, sometimes messy

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dynamic. The rhetoric of this scene thus reflects thematic relationships that others have observed in the play more broadly. Gillian Murray Kendall rightly notes that Titus mixes “literal and metaphorical (or figurative) meanings,” and I develop her suggestion that the boundary between the two is indeed “fragile.”11 Richard Meek has argued persuasively that the play reimagines sympathy as an imaginative, affective activity.12 I also agree with Vernon Guy Dickson that the play shows “a destructive pattern of conflicted, partial, and uncritical emulations,” even if I find more selfconscious awareness of these patterns in Act 3, Scene 1, particularly in relation to biblical language.13 Drawing on early modern and contemporary biblical exegesis, then, I argue that within the play grief is felt as both stasis and excess as Titus tries to find some way of engaging with the past and the future. The excessively figurative language that he uses in this scene is a response to this pain, but it also locks him and Lavinia into a continual present that seems disconnected from the past and future. It is only when the Andronici decide to act together that the protagonist becomes able to move from a posture of static lament to one of active revenge. In what follows I suggest that Shakespeare uses Lamentations not so much as a “source” text, but as a theatrical and philosophical provocation for exploring the identity of the lamenter.

Lamentation and Rhetoric The classical Roman rhetorical tradition, and its influence on early modern English literature, has been much studied.14 Less has been said, however, about the influence of biblical rhetorical forms. Before turning to Act 3, Scene 2 of Titus, therefore, I want to consider how Shakespeare and his audience would have encountered the book of Lamentations and how it was interpreted in this culture. This richly poetic and figurative biblical text, which is notable for its shifts between male and female personae, mourns the siege and destruction of Jerusalem in 587/586 BCE. It details in often graphic language the human cost of the city’s fall and is perhaps the most resonant and enduring example of the literary genre of the lament. The biblical scholar Kathleen O’Connor describes laments as “prayers that erupt from wounds, burst out of unbearable pain, and bring it to language. Laments complain, shout, and protest. They take anger and despair before God and the community. They grieve. They argue. They find fault.”15 The lament is a genre that brings rhetoric and affect into close conversation. During the early modern period, Lamentations was believed to have been written by the prophet

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Jeremiah.16 A variety of commentaries, sermons, and poetic translations of Lamentations were available to early modern readers. These include texts by John Calvin, Daniel Tossanus, Guillaume Du Vair, John Udall, John Dod, Hugh Broughton, and John Donne. Following the model of philological biblical analysis established by humanists such as Erasmus, some of these writers focus on Hebrew semantics in their examination of the text. Uniting virtually all of these texts is a rich literary analysis of Lamentation’s language and imagery. Indeed, exegetes pay particular attention to this text’s unusual use of rhetorical figures and oratorical techniques.17 Early modern writers are especially interested in how the lamentation produces pathos in the reader or audience. As George Puttenham notes in The Arte of English Poesie (1589), the lament is a “very necessary device of the poet” because it allows him to “play also the physician, and not only by applying a medicine to the ordinary sickness of mankind, but by making the very grief itself (in part) cure of the disease.”18 The lament is able to cure grief not through contraries but through similarities. This is one reason why simile, personification, and metaphor are so central to the lamenter’s rhetoric. Early modern biblical exegetes make similar points. In The Lamentations and holy mourninges of the Prophet Ieremiah (1587), the French Protestant Daniel Tossanus says that the text is: Beautified with liuely portraitures, and verie fitte comparisons, which lead the Readers euen vnto the beholding of the verie same thinges that are spoken of. If then by the art of Oratorie, mens heartes are made flexible to compassions, when as there shalbe tould and figured out vnto them, the suddaine chaunges and reuolutions from great prosperitie to extreame beggarie, from an high estate, vnto a base and miserable condition: then of verie right ought a man to be mooued by these Lamentations of Ieremie: which art is aswell practized here, as any Oratour in the worlde is able. And it is a great deale lesse suspected, because hee lamenteth not any particular misshapes, but the spoyling of an whole country, and the verie ruine thereof.19

No less than the orator, the biblical lamenter conjures vivid scenes, striking personifications, and rhetorical comparisons before the eyes of his audience (enargia) in order to move their passions. We can see this rhetorical posture explored in Thomas Nashe’s Christs Teares over Ierusalem (1593). The speaker’s opening prayer to Christ asks that he “dew thy Spyrit plentifully into my inke” because “I hate in thy name to speake coldly to a quick-witted generation. Rather let my braines melt all to incke, and the floods of affliction driue out mine eyes before them.”20 For Nashe, affective literary inventio is linked to divine inspiration. The “affliction” that the

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speaker wishes to convey to his audience cannot be cold. It requires an active energia that mirrors the “dewing” of spirit and “melting” of inspiration that Christ and speaker perform. Like many writers, Tossanus and Nashe associate the rhetoric of Lamentations with the arts of oratory. They also understand the exegetical concern that there may be something dubious about the emotions explored in Lamentations. Nashe’s narrator wishes to be Christ’s “pure simple Orator. I am a child (as the holy Ieremy sayd), & know not how to speake, yet Omnia possum in eo qui me confortat, I can doe all things through the helpe of him that strenghteneth me.”21 But Christ’s “continued Oration” is anything but “simple.” Repeatedly, the narrator describes his passions and those of Jerusalem as “excessive,” with imagery to match.22 Likewise, Tossanus’s uneasy claim that Lamentations “is a great deale lesse suspected” than other oratories because of its universal applicability is worth pausing over. A central pillar of Roman oratorical teaching as outlined in Cicero and, particularly, Quintilian is the manipulation of the auditors’ emotions. In the Institutio Oratoria, Quintilian writes of the orator pleading before a judge, rendering him “overcome by his emotion” so that he bypasses truth and is “swept along by the tide of passion . . . For it is in the power over the emotions that the life and soul of oratory is to be found.”23 Tossanus knows the argument that the orator may move his audience to morally dubious ends by manipulative hyperbole.24 He alludes to Jeremiah’s “hyperbolicall or excessive kinde of speech.” John Calvin argues (not entirely convincingly) in his commentary on Lamentations that “though the expressions may seem hyperbolical, yet they do not exceed the greatness of the calamity.” And John Dod follows Tossanus in admitting that Lamentations contains an “excessive kinde of speech.”25 Just as Marcus urges Titus away from hyperbole and excessive passion, so commentators wonder whether the lamenter provokes the passions past the limits of rhetoric and reason, and to no good moral end. Many of these Protestant exegetes are influenced by Stoic and neo-Stoic writings on how far the emotions of one person should be felt by another. In Justus Lipsius’s Two Bookes of Constancie (1594) he argues that to feel pity or commiseration for the sufferings of others “is a verie daungerous contagion”: “Thinkest thou that anie vertue consisteth in softenesse and abjection of the minde? In sorrowing? In sighing? in sobbing, together, with such as weep? It cannot be so.” Rather, it is better to bypass pity altogether and to stress mercy which allows the constant person to actively aid another in distress: “He wil beholde mens miseries with the eye of compassion, yet ruled and guided by reason.”26 Bounds, order, reason:

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these are the neo-Stoic’s response to passions that threaten to overwhelm. Yet as Titus counters Marcus: “If there were reason for these miseries, / Then into limits could I bind these woes” (3.1.220–1). This lacerating response touches on a concern shared by Protestant and neo-Stoic commentators alike: what if the experience of suffering overwhelms reason altogether?27 Can this lack of reason be conveyed by the lamenter to others? What might this mean in the theater for both lamenter and audience? These questions go to the heart of Act 3, Scene 1 of Titus Andronicus.

Staging Lamentation Memorably, Lamentations begins by contrasting the present and the past: “How doeth the citie remaine solitary that was ful of people?” (1:1). The speaker reflects on the disparity between the plenitude of what was and the emptiness of what remains: it seems to defy reason. The beginning of Act 3, Scene 1 does something similar. Titus addresses the judges and senators: Hear me, grave fathers; noble tribunes, stay! For pity of mine age, whose youth was spent In dangerous wars whilst securely you slept; For all my blood in Rome’s great quarrel shed, For all the frosty nights that I have watched (3.1.1–5)

Grief has disturbed Titus’s sense of rhetorical propriety. He starts where he should end. It is notable that, after asking his audience to hear him, the first emotion that Titus appeals to is “pity” (commiseratio).28 In the Roman oratorical tradition, the ability of the orator to evoke pity is much discussed.29 Although this appeal can be found at the start of the speech (the exordium), and at selected places in the main body of an oration (narratio), it is most commonly used in the conclusion (the peroratio).30 This is where “we must let loose the whole torrent of our eloquence . . . It is at the close of our drama that we must really stir the theatre.”31 Titus’s griefstricken inability to observe rhetorical propriety means that his exhortations fall on deaf ears.32 The use of anaphora allows him to draw a contrast between the past and the present.33 Titus also performs an act of anamnesis, recalling a previous state in order to show that it now counts for nothing, like the speaker in Lamentations who says “Ierusalem remembered the days of her affliction, and of her rebellion, and all her pleasant things that shee had in times past” (1:7).34 His former allies have abandoned him. As John

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Donne puts it in his translation of Lamentation: “perfidiously / Her friends have dealt, and now are enemy” (1.2).35 Because his past valor cannot be activated the lamenter is left in the limbo of the present. Prostration is part of the bodily rhetoric of lamentation and Titus tries to persuade his audience in this way: “Andronicus lieth down, and the Judges pass by him” (3.1.12 SD). This striking stage direction marks the first important shift in the action. Even when the Roman orator appeals to pity he remains upright in posture.36 At the start of the first act, the Andronici brothers are both associated with uprightness (1.1.51, 203). After Saturninus becomes Emperor the Andronici do kneel to plead their case (1.1.430–89), but they never prostrate themselves. From uprightness to kneeling, Titus now embraces the earth. In the Bible prostration is often undertaken to appease God, especially in the Old Testament.37 In Lamentations, however, appeasement has failed. Chapter 2 says of the strongholds of the city that God “hath cast them downe to the grounde” (2:2), and of the inhabitants “he hath throwen downe, and not spared” (2:17). We see how “God takes everything in a downward direction . . . That which was upright and those who were erect and proud are brought low.”38 Similarly in classical Roman texts, defeated enemies often prostrate themselves before their conquerors. In his Annals (from the first century CE), Tacitus records the king Zorsines submitting to Rome in order to avoid more bloodshed: “he prostrated himselfe before the image of Caesar, to the great glorie of the Roman armie.”39 Titus now adopts the posture of the defeated enemy under God and the imperium. The earth – specifically dust – becomes the synecdoche of his abjection. The speaker in Lamentations 3:29 says that he “putteth his mouth in the dust, if there may be hope,” knowing full well that there is none. Titus says that “in the dust I write / My heart’s deep languor and my soul’s sad tears” (3.1.12–13), knowing too that this will achieve nothing. He goes on to say: “Let my tears staunch the earth’s dry appetite; / My son’s sweet blood will make it shame and blush” (3.1.14–15). The hyperbole of this request casts the earth as an antagonist, one who devours and who cannot, like the judges and senators, be appeased.40 Titus’s “bitter tears which now you see / Filling the aged wrinkles in my cheeks” (3.1.6–7) have no effect on the onstage audience.41 The mordant advice of the Rhetorica ad Herennium that “the Appeal to Pity must be brief, for nothing dries more quickly than a tear” is countered by Titus’s continual weeping.42 This is one of many moments in the scene when the conventions of classical oratory and of Judeo-Christian lamentation work generatively together. This is a Roman argumentum ad misericordium, an

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appeal for mercy for his sons, which evokes the language and imagery of Lamentations. Now left alone, Titus extends the image of tears flowing without end: O earth, I will befriend thee more with rain That shall distil from these two ancient ruins Than youthful April shall with all his showers. In summer’s drought I’ll drop upon thee still; In winter with warm tears I’ll melt the snow And keep eternal springtime on thy face, So thou refuse to drink my dear sons’ blood. (3.1.16–22)

Titus does more than cry; he is figured as weeping itself. The earth and the seasons change around him. He remains static, personified as an act of endless crying. Before, his grief was provoked by finding the present strangely disconnected from the past. Now, he is locked into the present moment of an activity that cannot make anything different in the future. Personification becomes action without issue. And yet he continues to perform that action. As the narrator in Lamentations 3:49 has it: “Mine eye droppeth without stay, and ceaseth not.” At his most abject, the lamenter does not expect restitution. He becomes a personification fixed in a single tense. We can also see this understanding of the lamenter in early modern biblical commentaries. In The Holy Love of Heauenly Wisdome (1594), Guillaume Du Vair writes of Jerusalem’s tears in 1:2: “Her cheeks were neuer dry, and her teares neuer ceased running. Her face was euer wet, and her eyes distilled continually. And alasse, how could her plaints end, when as there was no end of her miserie?”43 The lamenter is actio without end, but also without issue. Titus’s claim that “My tears are now prevailing orators” (3.1.26) is thus double-edged. Roman rhetoric has failed to elicit the proper response. Prostration has simply confirmed his abjection. If his tears orate anything then it is the awful stasis of grief.44 Lucius, the first member of his family to encounter Titus, says, “O noble father, you lament in vain . . . No tribune hears you speak” (3.1.27, 32). Seen from the perspective of one trained in the arts of Roman oratory, Titus’s pleas may well seem futile. Seen from the perspective of Judeo-Christian lamentation, the lamenter embodies the futility of an activity that he must nonetheless undertake and, indeed, personify: “If they did mark, / They would not pity me; yet plead I must” (3.1.34–5).45 Having addressed the earth, Titus now turns to more specific parts of the natural world to explore his grief:

Titus Andronicus and the Rhetoric of Lamentation Therefore I tell my sorrows to the stones, Who, though they cannot answer my distress, Yet in some sort they are better than the tribunes For that they will not intercept my tale. When I do weep, they humbly at my feet Receive my tears and seem to weep with me, And were they but attired in grave weeds Rome could afford no tribunes like to these. A stone is soft as wax, tribunes more hard than stones; A stone is silent and offendeth not, And tribunes with their tongues doom men to death.

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(3.1.37–47)

Titus addresses that most inanimate of substances, stone, in an act of negative prosopopoeia. The claim that the stones “seem to weep with me” is striking. In order for prospopoeia to work it must not “seem” but “be.” It takes something inanimate, makes it temporarily animate, and so invests it with the illusion of a past, present, and future. It also allows the speaker to undertake what Gavin Alexander calls “person-making.”46 By conjuring the voice of another into being, the speaker might escape the stasis of his present grief and imagine future possibilities. The idea of animating the stones through prospopoeia is alluded to (“And were they but attired in grave weeds”). Yet the audience knows that stones cannot wear clothes, speak, weep, or be soft. As objects they are locked, like Titus, into a present that cannot animate a future, pointing instead toward “death.” This tension between the animate and inanimate, and its effect on the identity of the lamenter, can also be seen in the Classical and JudeoChristian narratives that influence Shakespeare’s conception of this scene. I want to look in particular at the story of Niobe in book six of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Shakespeare knew this book well: it also contains the story of Tereus, Procne, and Philomela that is central to Lavinia’s assault and unmasking of her attackers.47 Niobe’s numerous children are killed by the gods in revenge for her arrogant opposition. In her grief she sits on the ground and her body metamorphoses into stone: Her cheeks wext hard, the aire could stirre no haire vpon hir head. The colour of her face was dim and cleerely void of blood, And sadly vnder open lids hir eies vnmooued stood. In all her body was no life: for euen her very tung And pallat of her mouth was hard, and ech to other clung. Her pulses ceased for to beat, her necke did cease to bow, Hir armes to stirre, her feete to goe, all powre fore-went as now And into stone her very woombe and bowels also bind. But yet she wept: and being hoist by force of wherling wind,

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adrian streete Was carried into Phrygia. There vpon a mountaines top Shee weepeth still in stone: from stone the dreerie teares doe drop.48

Grief petrifies Niobe into stony lamentation. Does she weep literal tears in defiance of her stony form? Or are her tears simply carved on the cheeks of a statue? Golding’s translation allows for both possibilities. Niobe is synonymous with stone and tears in the early modern period.49 The former represents her hubris, and the latter a grief that cannot be assuaged. This is marked by Golding’s use of the past tense: “But yet she wept.” Once removed to the mountain, however, the tense changes to the present: “She weepeth still in stone: from stone the drearie teares doe drop.” Like Titus’s negative prosopopoeia, Niobe’s act of metamorphosis is poised ambiguously between the inanimate and the animate, past and present tenses. Her tears – perhaps animate, perhaps not – lament a future that past hubris and present grief hold forever in abeyance. Likewise, in the commentaries on Lamentations, the grammar used to personify the lamenter as grief sees possible future actions as merely compounding the stasis of the present. Here is Du Vair again: I am from the crowne of the head vnto the soale of the foote full of sorrow, and there is no part of me that is not grieuiously touched. Me thinketh my bowels to be pluckt in pieces within me, and am of the opinion, that mine hart will riue in sunder. My mouth is as bitter as soote or gall, and I am eftsoones nothing else but bitternesse it selfe. For, all my words, thoughts, & deeds, are bitter, which way so euer I turne me, I see nothing but horror and trembling.50

This vivid characterismus shows the lamenter locked into a present state that is his identity and fate: because he is “bitternesse it selfe” he can only confront more bitterness in the future. Like other commentators, Du Vair connects this state to the persecution of the lamenter: “as for mine enemies, the extremitie of my miserie made them no more to melt, then if they had had stony hearts in their bodies, and frozen bloud in their vaines.”51 In Lamentations these pitiless enemies “deuoure” (2:16) the speaker, and the daughters of the city become as cruel as the animals in the “wildernes” (4:3). Likewise, Titus calls Rome “a wilderness of tigers” and his enemies are terrible “devourers” who “prey” on him and his family (3.1.54–7).52 In each case, the stasis of grief mirrors a relentless persecution. The focus of the scene turns again as Lavinia is introduced: marcus Titus, prepare thy aged eyes to weep, Or if not, thy noble heart to break: I bring consuming sorrow to thine age.

Titus Andronicus and the Rhetoric of Lamentation titus Will it consume me? Let me see it then. marcus This was thy daughter. titus Why, Marcus, so she is.

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Titus rejects Marcus’s attempt to draw a distinction between what Lavinia was and now is: “This was thy daughter.” His insistence that “she is” his daughter places Lavinia, her sufferings, and the pity of the audience firmly in the present.53 The lamenter and the lamented occupy the same grammatical and affective location. As noted earlier, the peroratio or conclusion is where the orator usually appeals to pity. In the Institutio Oratoria Quintilian also focuses on the actions used to rouse this emotion. Specifically, he describes how bodies might be brought before a court audience: bringing accused persons into court wearing squalid and unkempt attire, and of introducing their children and parents, and it is with this in view that we see blood-stained swords, fragments of bone taken from the wound, and garments spotted with blood, displayed by the accusers, wounds stripped of their dressings and scourged bodies bared to view. The impression produced by such exhibitions is generally enormous, since they seem to bring the spectators face to face with the cruel facts.54

Although Marcus is not introducing Lavinia to a court, this part of the scene does evoke Roman judicial language and practice. The presentation of Lavinia’s ravaged body (verberata corpora nudari), blood, and wounds will move the pity not only of her father but of the audience in the theater. Instead of the onstage audience of Senators and Judges, the theatrical audience are invited to behold, feel, and adjudicate. Notice as well how Marcus links sight to the act of “consuming.” Whereas in Lamentations the speaker says that “those that I haue nourished and brought vp, hath mine enemie consumed” (2:22), the treatment of Lavinia by Titus’s enemies will now “consume” him.55 The image of a parent forced to view the destruction of his or her children runs through Lamentations. As the speaker says elsewhere: “Mine eye breaketh mine heart because of all the daughters of my citie” (3:51).56 Commenting on this verse, John Dod cites it as an example of enargia moving the passions of an audience toward pity: “Good men must use their eyes to stirre vp their hearts to pitie and compassion, that so they may be pierced with griefe, and sorrow.”57 Titus first tries to comprehend Lavinia’s suffering through the trope of the hand: Speak, Lavinia, what accursed hand Hath made thee handless in thy father’s sight? What fool hath added water to the sea?

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adrian streete Or brought a faggot to bright-burning Troy? My grief was at the height before thou cam’st, And now like Nilus it disdaineth bounds. Give me a sword, I’ll chop off my hands too, For they have fought for Rome, and all in vain; And they have nursed this woe in feeding life; In bootless prayer have they been held up, And they have served me to effectless use. Now all the service I require of them Is that the one will help to cut the other. ’Tis well, Lavinia, that thou hast no hands, For hands to do Rome service is but vain. (3.1.67–81)

Lavinia’s suffering is gendered in oratorical terms.58 Her ability to “speak” is connected to the “service” that hands conventionally do in Rome. They fight, of course. But, just as importantly, their gestures help the orator to supplicate, as Titus has done in the past. Cicero and Quintilian stress the importance of actio or delivery, especially “voice and gesture, of which the one appeals to the eye and the other to the ear, the two senses by which all emotion reaches the soul.”59 Quintilian grants that gestures without words can be effective: Signs take the place of language in the dumb . . . The temper of the mind can be inferred from the glance and gait . . . Nor is it wonderful that gesture which depends on various forms of movement should have such power, when pictures, which are silent and motionless, penetrate into our innermost feelings with such power that they seem more eloquent than language itself.60

Unlike the audience and Marcus at this point, Titus is unaware that his daughter cannot speak. In his book Gesture and Acclamation in Ancient Rome, Gregory S. Aldrete says that “[w]hen a Roman spoke before an audience, he was simultaneously communicating in two languages, one verbal and one nonverbal, and the messages the two conveyed could be identical, complimentary, or different.”61 In a different but related context, Tossanus writes in his Lamentations commentary that “the voice and hands are but the outward signes of the affection of the heart.”62 Lavinia is thus a doubly imperfect orator, unable to engage the emotions (adfectus) of her audience or her heart through gesture and words. Ironically, Titus takes on the burden of emotional expression in this speech, rejecting the utility of hands and gestures before he knows that (imperfect) gesture is all that Lavinia has left.63 His speech inadvertently exposes the inability of

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male Roman oratory to encompass Lavinia’s pain or the violence done to her body. Like the female speaker in Lamentations who advises, “Lift vp thine hands toward him for the life of thy yong children” (2:19), Titus can now only offer “bootless prayer,” words and gestures seemingly addressed into a void. I want to consider further Lavinia’s physical appearance as an emblem of lamentation. Devoid of hands and tongue, and visibly bleeding not only from these injuries but also from the sexual assault she has suffered, she is found by her uncle “straying in the park, / Seeking to hide herself, as doth the deer/ That hath received some unrecuring wound” (3.1. 89–91). Lavinia wants to hide from the sight of others, an understandable instinct.64 In Lamentations, Jerusalem is personified as a woman who experiences similar emotions: “All that honoured her, despise her, because they haue seene her filthiness: yea, she sigheth, and turneth backward” (1:8). Like Lavinia, Jerusalem wants to hide her body from others but cannot. As the feminist biblical scholar Adele Berlin points out, the biblical audience are complicit in the shame of the feminized Jerusalem. They are asked to view an image of “revulsion and pity” and “are torn by ambivalent urges: we cannot bear to look but we cannot turn our eyes away.”65 Caught between hiding and exposure, the suffering woman cannot speak, only sigh, much as Lavinia does throughout this scene (3.1.211, 226–8). The image of the deer is also important. In a dark parody of the pastoral and Arcadian imagery that runs through Act 2, Lavinia has been sexually “hunted” in the forest.66 In Lamentations, Jerusalem is also depicted as a female victim of sexual assault at the hands of others: “The enemie hath stretched out his hande upon all her pleasant things: for she hath seene the heathen enter into her Sanctuarie” (1:10). In the terrible scene where Chiron and Demetrius mock Lavinia after the assault, the image of hands plays a prominent part (3.2.1–10), as it does later when Aaron tricks Titus (3.1.151–206). One of Marcus’s first questions to his niece is: “what stern ungentle hands / Hath lopped and hewed and made thy body bare / Of her two branches, those sweet ornaments / Whose circling shadows kings have sought to sleep in?” (2.3.16–19). The connection between the hands that carried out the assault on Lavinia, the deprivation of her own hands, and her bleeding “wound” foregrounds metonymy as a substitute for understanding.67 Lamentations also depicts Jerusalem’s clothing as stained with blood: “Her filthinesse is in her skirts” (1:9). The entry of a sexually violated woman covered in blood in Act 3, Scene 1 can be read with this verse in mind.68 Lavinia’s brutalized body, seemingly bleeding

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without end, is the recursive locus of this scene – indeed, of the remainder of the play. The responses that it provokes amongst the male characters oscillate uneasily between knowledge and incomprehension, pity and disgust. At the start of the scene, Titus tries to prevent death being visited on his sons. Now, death cleaves more closely to the Andronici who remain: “he that wounded her / Hath hurt me more than had he killed me dead” (3.1. 92–3). Although not quite a Coleridgean “death-in-life,” Shakespeare casts lamentation as a kind of living death. Existing in a recurring present is worse than being dead. After Titus has his sons’ heads and his own hand returned to him, the family confront deathliness. Marcus calls his heart “an ever burning hell” and says that “sorrow flouted at is double death”; Lucius comments “That ever death should let life bear his name, / Where life hath no more interest but to breathe!” (3.1.243–50). In Lamentations, God seems to abandon the lamenter utterly (1:13). As Berlin notes, the mourning performed by the lamenter “is closely associated with death and Sheol. Sheol is not only the place where the dead reside, it is the place where the lamenter feels himself to be.”69 This term is often debated by early modern theologians. In 1592, Adam Hill, in seeming agreement with Marcus, notes that Sheol “signifieth hell.”70 Some theologians even depict Sheol as a feminine state: “as if a man should say the mother, or the very state of death which in Hebrue is called . . . sheol, PETITIO or POSTVLATIO, the graue alwaies crauing, neuer satisfied.”71 The idea of Sheol as a state of feminine unsatisfaction is useful for understanding what follows. Titus says to his daughter: “Had I but seen thy picture in this plight, / It would have madded me; what shall I do / Now that I behold thy lively body so?” (3.1.104–6). By evoking ekphrasis negatively, the sentence emphasizes Titus’s bewilderment when confronted with Lavinia.72 He simply does not know how to respond: “What shall we do?” (3.1.134). If Roman oratory works on the principle of interaction between speaker and audience, by contrast the Judeo-Christian lamenter finds himself searching for a response and adequate comparisons.73 In Lamentations, the speaker asks: “What thing shall I take to witnesse for thee? What thing shall I compare to thee, O daughter Ierusalem? what shall I liken to thee, that I may comfort thee, O virgin daughter Zion? for thy breach is great like the sea: who can heale thee?” (2:13). This verse goes to the heart of Titus’s dilemma. Like Lavinia’s “wound,” the “breach” suffered by the feminized Zion is a trauma emphasizing the invidious inadequacy of rhetorical comparison. Yet we see how the biblical speaker still reaches for a comparative image, the sea. As an image of lamentation it

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captures well the potentially infinite feeling of grief and the experience of being utterly overwhelmed. When Titus first evokes the sea, he pictures himself “upon a rock, / Environed with the wilderness of sea” that is about to “swallow him” (3.1.94–8). Before, the earth as insatiable antagonist soaked up Titus’s tears and the wilderness was populated by animalistic enemies. Now, water becomes the central metaphorical vehicle for countenancing a grief that, as Tossanus puts it, “ouerflowe[s] and exceede[s],” yet somehow still needs to be spoken and interpreted (3.1.111–16).74 As he searches for adequate rhetorical forms, Titus turns to another set of aqueous images: Shall thy good uncle and thy brother Lucius And thou and I sit round about some fountain, Looking all downwards to behold our cheeks, How they are stained like meadows yet not dry, With miry slime left on them by a flood? And in the fountain shall we gaze so long Till the fresh taste be taken from that clearness And made a brine pit with our bitter tears? (3.1.123–30)75

As noted earlier, the classic posture of the lamenter is “patiently to hang downe the head, and to be humbled in silence without reply.”76 However, Titus now evokes a collective act of mourning, perhaps following Lamentations 2:10. In Du Vair’s commentary he writes of the poore gray haired old men which could no way escape, finding no more help in their God, and seeing him deafe vnto their prayers, being altogether out of heart, layd them selves downe on the ground, and leaning vpon their elbowes, pitifully lamented their miserie . . . The poore and delicate maydens, and desolate fatherlesse children followed them, casting downe their eyes, bedeawing their cheekes, & holding downe their heads, euen as the Lilly doth when it is sore beaten with rayne and wind.77

Yet this act of ratiocinatio does not yield the answers that Titus’s questions demand. Nature and tears remain stubbornly mute. Titus’s claim that “I understand her signs” (3.1.144) is followed by a failed act of ethopoeia: “Had she a tongue to speak, now would she say / That to her brother which I said to thee” (3.1.146). He can only evoke this act of speaking in the past or in the future conditional, not the present act itself. Titus’s conclusion that Lavinia is now “As far from help as limbo is from bliss” (3.1.150) is another expression of Sheol, this time on behalf of the group of lamenters gathered around him. Like Niobe sitting on the ground, everything seems to petrify.

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After Aaron cuts off Titus’s hand, there is a shift in the scene’s visual and verbal rhetoric: O, here I lift this one hand up to heaven And bow this feeble ruin to the earth. [Kneels.] If any power pities wretched tears, To that I call. [Lavinia kneels.] What, wouldst thou kneel with me? Do then, dear heart, for heaven shall hear our prayers, Or with our sighs we’ll breathe the welkin dim And stain the sun with fog, as sometimes clouds When they do hug him in their melting bosoms. (3.1.207–14)

Caught between the act of supplicatio and prostratio, Titus tries to accommodate two contrary physical postures. It is an apt image for a scene that mediates between Classical and Judeo-Christian ideas of lamentation. Like the speaker in Lamentations who says “powre out thine heart like water before the face of the Lord: lift vp thine handes towarde him for the life of thy young children” (2:19), this speech brings together water, gesture, parents and children, and hearts. Titus’s and Lavinia’s hearts are affectively conjoined. Sighing together in sympathy, father and daughter try to metaphorically exceed a nature that offers them no solace.78 It is at this moment that Marcus enjoins the limits of “reason” quoted earlier in this chapter. Titus rejects this proposition by embracing an extraordinarily copious natural imagery: And wilt thou have reason for this coil? I am the sea. Hark how her sighs doth blow. She is the weeping welkin, I the earth. Then must my sea be moved with her sighs, Then must my earth with her continual tears Become a deluge overflowed and drowned, For why my bowels cannot hide her woes, But like a drunkard must I vomit them. Then give me leave, for losers will have leave To ease their stomachs with their bitter tongues. (3.1.225–34)79

This prosopopoeia invites the audience to see the affect of suffering and the movements of nature as analogous. The speech turns what could be a trite commonplace into a new image of lamentation. As Lavinia weeps and sighs like the “welkin” (skies), the sea and earth personified by Titus mirror her overwhelmingly copious grief so that these elements of nature drown each

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other in their excess. The continual tears, sighs, swollen bowels, and vomit described in Lamentations (1:2; 1:8, 1:20; 4:21) are transformed through Shakespeare’s rhetorical art into a powerful depiction of grief as a deluge that, because it cannot be contained, erases distinctions between the constituent elements of nature.80 It also dissolves gender. There is something emasculating about a male Roman speaker whose words, actions, and body cannot contain his children.81 The present-tense simplicity of that arresting half line “I am the sea” embodies personification as limitless, feminized grief. The rhetoric of lamentation “acts,” then, but grief seems unsurpassable. Titus asks, “When will this fearful slumber have an end?” (3.1.253), perhaps echoing Lamentations 4:18: “our end is neere, our days are fulfilled, for our end is come.” Even Marcus, “a stony image, cold and numb,” declares that “no more will I control thy griefs” and that “Now is a time to storm” (3.1. 259–64). Yet Titus fails to do anything. Marcus asks “Why art thou still?” to which Titus simply responds with laughter: “Ha, ha, ha!” (3.1.264–5). He realizes that, for all his words and actions, the lamenter must indeed be “still” in his grief. Paradoxically he is not so different from the “stony image” of the Stoic who keeps grief at arm’s length. He occupies a space where action either arrests or exceeds to no avail. The lamenter cannot do, he can only be. Small wonder that he laughs bitterly. He has not “another tear to shed” (3.1.267) as he starts to understand that “sorrow is an enemy” (3.1.268) to the action that might impel him beyond the stasis of grief. His desire to find the way to “Revenge’s cave” (3.1.271) marks a decisive shift toward the Senecan rhetoric and persona that he adopts in Acts 4 and 5 as he pursues restitution. However, I want to focus on Titus’s line that his sons’ heads “threat me I shall never come to bliss / Till all these mischiefs be returned again / Even in their throats that hath committed them” (3.1. 273–5). One of the few moments in Lamentations that signals the possibility of change comes in the penultimate verse of the final chapter: “Turne thou vs unto thee, O Lord, and we shallbe turned; renewe our days as of old” (5:21).82 This renewal, this (re)turning that holds out the promise of something better becomes, daringly in Titus’s mouth, a return to activity personified as vengeance. It may even signal a different biblical register altogether. In Psalm 7, David bemoans his persecution by Saul. He condemns those who “treade my life downe vpon the earth, and lay mine honour in the dust” (7:5). But he also forecasts his enemy’s defeat: “His mischiefe shall returne vpon his owne head, and his cruelty shall fall upon his owne pate” (7:16). This model of Davidic “revenge” is useful for understanding the

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scene’s move from the stasis of grief to action. The movement out of lamentation must involve a (re)turn to collective activity. As Titus commits to the “task I have to do” (3.1.276), he invites those who remain to “circle me about” and “swear unto my soul to right your wrongs” (3.1.276–9). After this collective “vow” they pick up the severed heads and hands from the ground and exit. He can only move beyond this abject state because, in the words of the Psalm, “the congregation of the people compasse thee about,” enabling him to “returne on high” (7:7). The Andronici part at the end of the scene to set things right politically in Rome. They collaborate in their revenge, most notably in the banquet scene and, with the help of the Goths, in the overthrow of Saturninus. Yet it is Titus who, in his final words at the end of the scene, connects the rhetoric of lamentation to the promise of future action: “we have much to do” (3.1.288). In moving from passive lamentation to active vengeance, Titus will exceed (and how) all the bonds of ethical propriety in order to remake Rome. The play disrupts any straightforward distinction between passive lamentation and active vengeance. In the final scene Marcus cannot recount the story of what has happened for fear that “floods of tears will drown my oratory” (5.3.89). He is aided by Lucius, who tells how his “father’s tears” were “despised” (5.3.100) by Rome and how he was banished “weeping” (5.3.104) from the city only to “beg relief among Rome’s enemies, / Who drowned their enmity in my true tears / And oped their arms to embrace me as a friend” (5.3.105–7). Like his father, Lucius undertakes collective political action by harnessing the affective power of lamentation. He echoes Titus’s earlier rhetoric: “I am the turned-forth, be it known to you, / That have preserved her welfare in my blood” (5.3.108–9). This return, which restores the Andronici, is powered by unruly affect. Indeed, Lucius, Marcus, and the Boy all seem to forget their political responsibilities in the sight of Titus’s corpse. They weep and “melt” (5.3.160) over the body, with the Boy stating “O Lord, I cannot speak to him for weeping, / My tears will choke me if I ope my mouth” (5.3.173–4). This is also a return to the rhetoric and action of Act 3, Scene 1. The representative of the imperium moves quickly to restore political momentum by switching the focus to Aaron’s fate: “You sad Andronici, have done with woes, / Given sentence on this execrable wretch / That hath been breeder of these dire events” (5.3.175–7). It is notable that in condemning Aaron and the dead Tamora, Lucius refuses them any pity (5.3.180; 198–9). This chilly neo-Stoic pose offers an apt punishment for the villains. However, Shakespeare never lets the audience forget that this “reasonable” response is only made possible by those far less rational emotions that course just under the surface of the new ruling family.

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In Lamentations, Shakespeare found a text that provoked him both ethically and rhetorically. It also seems likely that he was stimulated by the exegetical literature surrounding that text. Examining the exegesis of particular biblical texts can shed important new light on how Scripture is used on stage by early modern playwrights. There is nothing “anachronistic” about the pagan Titus invoking Judeo-Christian Scripture. Those in the audience trained like Shakespeare in the studia humanitatis would have understood this scene as a syncretic set-piece that explores competing cultural attitudes toward lamentation. Yet although the scene ends with the move toward revenge, the central point is that Classical and JudeoChristian ethical assumptions sometimes work together, sometimes against each other. This scene thus exemplifies a kind of theatrical cognitive dissonance. The audience are presented with familiar modes of reading, but by activating them simultaneously Shakespeare denies his audience, and his lamenting protagonist, the stability and comfort of a rational path of experience.

chapter 8

The Acts of Pericles: Shakespeare’s Biblical Romance Hannibal Hamlin

From its earliest history, Shakespeare’s Pericles seems to have been a conundrum. Although there were four quarto editions of Pericles before the 1623 First Folio (which did not include the play), and more thereafter, they all derived from the first quarto of 1609, which was a mess.1 Even to label the play as Shakespeare’s is problematic, since most (though not all) critics agree that it is a collaborative work, co-written with a less talented playwright, perhaps George Wilkins (author of the prose version of the story, published in 1608, The Painful Adventures of Pericles Prince of Tyre).2 But while Ben Jonson famously savaged Pericles as a “mouldy tale,” the play was evidently a hit, and not just with the hoi polloi, since the ambassadors of Venice and France, along with the “Secretary of Florence,” saw it at the Globe in 1606, and it was performed for the king in 1619. This early popularity did not endure, however. George Lillo’s 1738 adaptation of Pericles was not a success, and Shakespeare’s Pericles was not performed thereafter until 1854, despite several planned productions that never made it to the stage. The play’s critical reception has likewise been mixed. Edmund Malone and George Steevens disagreed about both the play’s merits and its authorship in brief pieces published side-by-side in James Boswell’s edition of The Plays and Poems of William Shakespeare (1821).3 Recent critics and audiences have been more positive about Pericles, though they have been unable to resolve its textual problems. This complicated and contradictory history of the play might be said to reflect (or even be a consequence of) its content, which presents a complex intertextual nexus that at once invites and defies allegorical mapping and interpretation, and yet powerfully effects a dramatic sense of conversion. Key to this nexus is biblical allusion, which merges with a variety of other textual forms. Without constituting a full-scale allegory, the biblical allusions and echoes add a distinctly Christian resonance to the romance. This is not to say, however, that they provide a distinct theology. In her study of biblical allusion in Shakespeare’s other Ephesus play, The Comedy of Errors, 140

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Patricia Parker concludes that while such allusions are significant, they exist in a peculiar “combinatory economy” with the material borrowed from secular sources such as Plautus, and they constitute less a theological system than “a source of metaphors for dramatic structure.”4 A similar economy is at work in Pericles. Here, biblical allusions, particularly to the stories of Jonah and Paul, combine with the Apollonius stories, reverberations of Augustine’s conversion, and vestiges of medieval religious drama, specifically the miracle or saint play. The biblical allusions, for the audience as well as the play’s characters, convert the fear and amazement that are commonplace in the face of stormy seas, shipwreck, and inexplicable turns of fortune into a response verging on religious awe. In the Bible, in classical literature, in Elizabethan travel writing, the sea voyage – struggling toward a safe port, beset by tempests, interrupted temporarily or permanently by shipwreck – is usually understood as a test of providence. For the seafarer, as for the reader of sea stories, the question is whether human life, like the sea journey, is guided by Fortune, dumb luck, or a divine hand. Is there a god controlling the storm, and, as in Job, drawing out the monsters of the deep with a hook (Job 40:20–1)? In the sea journeys and shipwrecks Pericles undergoes, is he watched over by a providential God? Shakespeare’s principal sources both emphasize a sense of divine control: John Gower’s Confessio Amantis, in keeping with the Greek Romance of Apollonius of Tyre (Pericles’s original), describes his protagonist as at the mercy of, and ultimately restored by, the pagan gods; in Laurence Twine’s Patterne of Painefull Adventures (c. 1594), these gods are converted into the Christian God. Shakespeare’s treatment, on the other hand, is surprisingly ambiguous about the force that, in Hamlet’s words, shapes our ends. Unlike Twine, and to a far greater extent than Gower, Shakespeare puts his hero into the hands of gods of the classical pantheon: Jove, Juno, Neptune, and especially Diana. And the epiphany that sends Pericles to Diana’s Temple at Ephesus differs significantly in the three English versions. In Gower, the “hie god” that visits Apollonius is unspecified, perhaps pagan (Jove), perhaps Christian, but “he” is clearly male.5 In Twine’s Christianized adventure, Apollonius is sent to Ephesus by an angel.6 Only in Shakespeare’s account does the goddess Diana descend to direct Pericles to Ephesus to “do upon mine altar sacrifice” (and of course to reunite with his lost wife Thaisa).7 Shakespeare’s deliberate emphasis on the pagan details of his story has led some critics to read the play in pagan, or at least non-Christian, terms. For instance, Kristian Smidt argues that Pericles’s voyages, shipwrecks and all, are guided by Fortune, and the final family reunion is brought about

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not by divinity but by Nature or “the Life Force.”8 Alternatively, some feminist readers, such as Elizabeth Hart, take Shakespeare’s Diana more literally and see the play as a celebration of a female and distinctly nonChristian deity.9 Hart notes, intriguingly, that it was at Ephesus that the third ecumemical council declared Mary Theotokus or “god-bearer,” and that this cast her as another manifestation of the Great Mother that also included Diana, as the goddess describes herself, for instance, in Apuleius’s The Golden Ass: “I am also she that is the natural mother of all things, mistress and governess of all the elements, the initial progeny of worlds, chief of powers divine, queen of heaven, the principal of the gods celestial, the light of the goddesses.”10 Furthermore, Caroline Bicks points out that while Diana was certainly associated with female chastity, for Shakespeare’s contemporaries she held a much richer range of associations, a “constellation of contradictions” that include Amazons (anciently associated with Ephesus), childbirth (under the auspices of Lucina, another of Diana’s manifestations), and even, for some English Protestants, the Church of England (reading the pagan–Christian conflict in Ephesus described in Acts 19 as symbolic of the Protestant struggle against Catholics).11 Ephesus, too, had a complex set of associations: while the city obviously plays an important role in Paul’s mission in the book of Acts, Constance Relihan suggests that for seventeenth-century Englishmen, Ephesus and the rest of the geography of Pericles might also have been connected with the Ottoman Turks, whose empire included most of the eastern Mediterranean.12 These complex connotations of the play’s geography and presiding pagan goddess make Pericles difficult to pin down, as it presents a “constellation of contradictions” in its own right. Another crucial element of this constellation is the significant number of biblical allusions in the play; what is to be made of them? One has to acknowledge, challenging Relihan’s argument, that for a Christian audience, steeped in biblical culture, the primary associations with Ephesus, Antioch, Tyre, and Tarsus would have been with the events described in Acts and the New Testament epistles.13 If Christian readings of the play can seem forced and partisan,14 readings which interpret the play as pagan also seem strained. A reading of Pericles is needed that can appreciate its biblical dimension without forcing on it a Christian allegory that the play cannot comfortably bear. A good starting point for exploring the play’s complex engagement with biblical allusions is the set of references to the book of Jonah. While the allusions to Jonah might seem to invite an allegorical interpretation,

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Pericles opens up but also frustrates such a reading. In 2.1, after his first disastrous adventure in Antioch, the shipwrecked Pericles is cast up on the shores of Pentapolis. Meanwhile, three fishermen discuss the wreck they have just witnessed; they compare human society to their experience of fish and the sea. The first fisherman’s statement about how fishes live at sea – “as men do a-land: the great ones eat up the little ones” – is proverbial wisdom.15 The same fisherman later compares a miser to a whale: I can compare our rich misers to nothing so fitly as to a whale: ’a plays and tumbles, driving the poor fry before him, and at last devours them all at a mouthful. Such whales have I heard on o’th’land, who never leave gaping till they swallowed the whole parish, church, steeple, bells, and all. (2.1.29–34)

To this the second fisherman replies that “if I had been sexton I would have been that day in the belfry,” explaining further, Because he should have swallowed me too, and when I had been in his belly I would have kept such a jangling of the bells that he should never have left till he cast bells, steeple, church, and parish up again. (2.1.39–42)

The seminal story of being in the belly of a fish and then cast up again is, of course, that of Jonah. This was among the most popular episodes in the Bible, a regular focus of sermons and commentaries; it was among the first parts of Du Bartas’s La Sepmaine translated into English (1592), and even the subject of the most popular biblical play of the period, A Looking Glass for London and England (1594), by Thomas Lodge and Robert Greene. Michael Drayton wrote a paraphrase of “The Song of Jonah in the Whale’s Belly” in fourteener couplets, as did John Hall in broken Poulter’s Measure (or the hymn meter later known as Short Meter), much earlier.16 Jonah was also a popular subject for woodcuts and other biblical art. The allusion to Jonah is particularly apt at this point, since the eavesdropping Pericles has himself just been cast up out of the sea. In the Bible, the prophet Jonah tries to avoid his calling to go to Nineveh, but, while trying to escape by sea, Jonah is caught in a “great winde” and a “mightie tempest” sent by God. The mariners, convinced that their salvation lies in sacrifice, throw Jonah overboard (at his own request) to appease the divine wrath. Jonah is swallowed by a “great fish” (typically, in popular lore, a whale). After three days in the belly of the fish, a repentant Jonah is “cast out” upon the shore to fulfill his duty. By contrast, in Pericles, the fisherman’s “whale” is the miser, who swallows up not just reluctant prophets but whole parishes.

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The parishioners who find themselves in this belly are not in breach of divine command, but rather victims of social injustice. When the other fisherman plays the sexton and frees the parish by ringing the church bells, this is presumably to suggest that the solution to misers lies in the church and its teachings. But Pericles is not swallowed by a miser, and the fisherman’s social critique seems rather gratuitous in the larger context of the play. Nor does the Jonah story have anything to do with the rich and the poor. The point of the allusion, then, seems to be simply to draw a parallel between Pericles and Jonah as seafaring victims of storm and shipwreck.17 Yet storms, as William R. Elton points out, are traditionally interpreted as expressions of the divine will.18 For Calvin, thunder was the voice of God, and Edward Guilpin in The Whipper of the Satyre (1601) writes, “But let the Heavens frowne, the Welkin thunder, / Perhaps weele feare a little, and minde our God.”19 This is exactly the response of the biblical sailors transporting Jonah, who cry “everie man unto his god” (Jonah 1:5).20 However, Pericles’s speech at the beginning of 2.1, after being cast up on shore (“wet,” as the stage direction calls for), is less a prayer than an angry complaint, actually closer to Lear’s tirade against the storm out on the heath.21 Pericles calls on the stars to “cease your ire,” and on the “Wind, rain, and thunder” to “remember earthly man / Is but a substance that must yield to you” (2.1.1–3). By contrast, in his vengeful rage Lear actually encourages the storm, but the terms are similar: he calls on the “rain, wind, thunder” (and fire) and admits his helplessness (“here I stand your slave”). A further connection between Pericles and King Lear lies in Lear’s call for another flood: “Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage, blow! / You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout / Till you have drenched our steeples, drowned the cocks!” (3.2.1–3).22 The apocalyptic vision of the drowning of the church parallels the fisherman’s parable of the whale-like miser who swallows “church, steeple, bells, and all,” both of them anachronistic given their pre-Christian settings. In neither case – Lear on the heath, Pericles on the beach – is it clear whether the storm and floods manifest a divine power (as in Jonah), the influence of the “angry stars” (as Pericles imagines), or just bad luck. In the world of King Lear, the existence of the gods, or any providential order, seems very much in doubt.23 In Pericles, the gods certainly exist (as Diana’s appearance confirms), but whether they are responsible for Pericles’s shipwreck is less clear.24 Furthermore, unlike Jonah, and despite the claims of critics who have tried to discover his fatal flaws or errors, Pericles (like Job) seems to have done nothing for which he might reasonably be punished.25 Thus, while the play seems to

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invite a meaningful alignment between Pericles and Jonah, it intimates a parallel only to thwart it. Pericles alludes to Jonah again in Act 3. Once again, Pericles is on the sea, this time with his new wife Thaisa, who is pregnant with his child. Once again, a storm blows up that threatens to sink their ship; as Shakespeare’s Gower informs us, “the grizzled north / Disgorges such a tempest forth” (3.0.48–9). Once again, Pericles, following the traditional interpretation of the storm as the voice or hand of the divine, calls on the powers behind the storm to break it off: The god of this great vast, rebuke these surges Which wash both heaven and hell, and thou that hast Upon the winds command, bind them in brass, Having called them from the deep. O, still Thy deafening dreadful thunders, gently quench (3.1.1–6) Thy nimble sulphurous flashes!

Earlier, in the wake of the other storm, Pericles called on the “angry stars” and blamed his state on “the waters and the wind” (2.1.1). Pericles called himself “a man, whom both the waters and the wind / In that vast tenniscourt hath made the ball / For them to play upon” (2.1.58–60).26 But here in Act 3 Pericles doesn’t just personify the weather, he explicitly addresses a god – presumably Neptune, the deity in charge of the “great vast” of the sea, and to whom Gower has just referred (“The vessel shakes / On Neptune’s billow” [3.0.44–5]). An attentive listener, however, might hear in Pericles’s language an allusion to the story of a different god calming a stormy sea.27 In Luke, Jesus and the disciples are beset by a storm as they are sailing on the Sea of Galilee toward the region of the Gadarenes. Jesus is sleeping calmly, and the terrified disciples wake him (echoing the Jonah story) to save them. “Master, master, we perish,” they cry. At which point, “he arose, and rebuked the wind, & the waves of water: & they ceased, and it was calme.” They then murmur, “Who is this that commandeth bothe the windes and water, and they obey him!” (Luke 8:24–5). The situation in Pericles is similar, and Pericles’s call to the god who “has upon the wind command” to “rebuke these surges” even uses several of the keywords in the biblical account. The excitement of the storm sends Thaisa into premature labor, and she gives birth to a girl, seemingly at the cost of her own life. Alerting the audience to the symbolic implications of his own journey – the ancient and paradigmatic life-as-a-sea-voyage metaphor described most powerfully by Hans Blumenberg28 – Pericles refers to his “poor infant,” soon to be named

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Marina after the sea that gave her birth, as “this fresh new seafarer” (3.1.41). Without giving him time to grieve, however, the superstitious sailors insist that the body of Thaisa must be cast overboard, since “the sea works high, the wind is loud and will not lie till the ship be cleared of the dead” (3.1. 47–9). As subsequent allusions confirm, the sailors see the body of Thaisa as a Jonah, calling down the storm on them just as the presence of the errant prophet did for the biblical mariners. The use of “Jonah” as a term for any person bearing bad luck, especially on board ship, seems to have been current by the time of Pericles, especially among sailors. In his preface to The Travels of Certaine Englishmen, Theophilus Lavender tells the story of a sea voyage from 1605 which ran afoul of a storm. After quoting Psalm 107, verse 27 (“They were tossed to and fro, and staggered like drunken men, and all their cunning being gone”), Lavender writes that “every man called upon his god (like the Mariners in Jonas ship).” The superstitious sailors then decided that an English preacher, whom they have seen with various books, is a conjurer, and they “thought it best to make a Jonas of him, and to cast both him and his books into the Sea.” Fortunately for the preacher, they changed their minds, and “by the providence of God, they came all safely to their desired Port.”29 Thaisa’s body, on the other hand, is cast overboard, and Pericles’s eulogy makes clear the parallel with Jonah: “A terrible child-bed hast thou had, my dear . . . The aye-remaining lamps, the belching whale, / And humming water must o’erwhelm thy corpse / Lying with simple shells” (3.1.56, 62–4; italics mine). Though she doesn’t actually end up in the belly of a whale, Thaisa is belched up out of the “belly” of the sea, as Cerimon, the physician who saves her, puts it: “If the sea’s stomach be o’ercharged with gold, / ’Tis a good constraint of fortune / It belches upon us” (3.2.56–8). So, although she is cast up on to the shore, it is seemingly “fortune” that is responsible, not divine providence. Similarly, though Thaisa is seemingly miraculously restored to life, the physician himself acknowledges a different reason for Thaisa’s recovery: Virtue and cunning were endowments greater Than nobleness and riches. Careless heirs May the two latter darken and expend, But immortality attends the former, (3.2.27–31) Making a man a god.

Just as Thaisa’s fate is ascribed to “fortune” rather than the divine, here too Cerimon attributes the conferring of immortality to the abstract quality of “virtue.” But the physician’s modest disavowal of his own powers invokes

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an even great power. The clustering of the image of a “belching” sea and whale, the particular words “immortality” and “[m]aking a man a god,” and, in short order, the performance of Thaisa’s apparent resurrection, surely reminded Shakespeare’s audience of the traditional Christian interpretation of Jonah as a type of Christ. The ultimate source for this typological reading is Jesus himself: Then answered certeine of the Scribes & of the Pharises, saying, Master, we wolde se a signe of thee. But he answered, and said to them, An evil and adulterous generacion seketh a signe, but no signe shal be give unto it, save the signe of the Prophet Jonas. For as Jonas was thre dayes, and thre nights in the whales bellie: so shal the Sonne of man be thre dayes and thre nights in the heart of the earth. (Matt. 12:38–40)

Given the typological association of Jonah’s resurrection with Christ’s, then, the allusions to Jonah in Pericles seem significant not only for Pericles himself but also for Thaisa.30 Furthermore, as in the Jonah story, the storm in Pericles is seen as purposeful, requiring appeasement. Thaisa’s body is the “Jonah,” the offensive passenger, which must be cast overboard into the “belly” of the sea in order to satisfy the “god of this great vast.” Like Jonah, she is cast up on shore, and like Jesus, whom Jonah prefigures, she “dies” and is miraculously brought back to life. And yet, Thaisa is not Jonah or Christ, and in reality she never truly dies. The point of the allusions, then, is not to suggest that Thaisa is a “Christ-figure,” but rather to reinforce the sense that these are miraculous and mysterious events by exploiting the audience’s conditioned associations with the stories of Jonah and Christ. The biblical allusions that inform both Thaisa’s and Pericles’s stories do not function as a form of dramatic typology, as it were, suggesting a clear and determinate connection across texts (the Book of Jonah, Pericles) or figures (Thaisa = Jonah = Jesus). Rather, the allusions activate a mode of processing experience. Like Lavender’s sailors, Shakespeare’s audience is primed to use familiar biblical stories as a way of making meaning of events. Indeed, characters within the play seem to model this mode of associative interpretation, understanding their own situation and each other through biblical allusions and echoes. For example, while Thaisa was allusively connected to Christ in Act 3, a similar connection is made to Marina at her “resurrection” in Act 5. Scarcely believing that he has found the daughter he thought dead, Pericles asks her, “But are you flesh and blood? / Have you

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a working pulse, and are no fairy / Motion?” (5.1.143–5). Although the passage recalls ironically the earlier use of “flesh and blood” by the Mytilene brothel keepers, referring to their stock in trade (4.5.41), it here suggests the doubt of the disciples after Jesus’s resurrection, and his reassurances to them of his physical presence: “Then he said unto them, Why are ye troubled? and wherefore do doutes arise in your hearts? Beholde mine hands and my fete: for it is I my self: handle me, and se: for a spirit hathe not flesh and bones, as ye se me have” (Luke 24:38–9).31 Marina is not Christ, but to Pericles (and us) her apparent return to life seems similarly miraculous. Furthermore, the emphasis on flesh and blood is also appropriate to the play’s emphasis on family.32 There may even be a sense – suggesting that human families share some of the sacredness of the heavenly one – in which father, mother, and daughter together embody a kind of Trinity (three in one). The trials of Pericles and Marina are implicitly aligned with Christ’s when Diana sends Pericles to Ephesus to “mourn thy crosses with thy daughters.” Once there they will discover Thaisa (resurrected once again, after she “dies” in a faint at 5.3.14), who has born her own share of trials. Following the pattern of Christ’s story, the whole family has suffered, died, and, in a sense, been brought back to life by being reunited.33 In addition to perceiving biblical allusions, Shakespeare’s audience, immersed in a biblically saturated culture, would also no doubt have recognized that the journeys of Pericles bear a striking geographic similarity to those of the Apostle Paul, as described in Acts and in his own epistles. Readers of the maps in Ortelius’s Theatrum Orbis Terrarum could have found most of the cities of Pericles – Antioch, Ephesus, Tyre, Tarsus, and Myteline – on the Descriptio Perigrinationis D. Pauli included in later editions.34 Many Geneva Bibles, which were much more easily and widely accessible than Ortelius, also included a map titled “The Description of the Countries and Places Mentioned in the Acts of the Apostles,” and these featured below the map a list of places, including again Antiocha, Ephesus, Mytilene, Tarsus, and Tyrus.35 In addition to tracing actual movement through a real landscape, the accounts of Paul’s travels also feature, significantly, shipwrecks – what Northrop Frye called the normal means of transportation in romance.36 In his second letter to the Christians in Corinth, Paul writes that “I suffered thrice shipwracke: night and day have I bene in the depe sea” (2 Cor. 11:25). One of these wrecks is described in Acts 27, when the sailors ignore Paul’s warning and are punished by God with a fierce storm. Nevertheless, an angel comes to Paul promising that though the ship will be lost, no one will be harmed. The ship runs aground, and though they encounter “Barbarians,” the castaways are treated kindly

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(Acts 28.2). Paul mentions shipwreck again in his First Epistle to Timothy (1:19). If one hunts for further parallels between Paul’s and Pericles’s adventures, they are not hard to find. Paul often faces death, but, like Pericles, he always escapes, sometimes by curious means, such as when he is lowered over the walls of Damascus in a basket (Acts 9:25). In Antioch, Paul and the disciples hear a prophecy that there will be a great famine, and they send food relief to “the brethren which dwelt in Judea” (Acts 11:27–30); Pericles brings ships full of grain to relieve the starving people of Tarsus. Paul is also responsible for a resurrection, when a young man named Eutychus falls asleep listening to him preach and topples out of a window. Like Thaisa’s resurrection in Pericles, though, this may just involve Paul recognizing that Eutychus is not actually dead (“his life is in him,” he says, at Acts 20:10). Most strikingly, Paul also has a major encounter with the cult of Diana at Ephesus in Acts 19. A crowd gathers, spurred on by a silversmith and others whose livelihood depends upon the temple practices, and they twice cry, “Great is Diana of the Ephesians” (Acts 19:28). It is not Paul who calms the mob, though, but the town clerk, who reasons with them that no offense has been committed and they risk punishment under the law. Underscoring the parallels between Pericles (as a version of the Apollonius story) and Acts is a shared genre: romance. Much ink has been spilled over the question of the genre of Shakespeare’s late plays, some of which (The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest) were included among the comedies and another (Cymbeline) with the tragedies in the First Folio, but often labeled as either romances (following Edward Dowden) or tragicomedies by modern critics. Pericles was not included in the First Folio, and the title page of the 1609 Quarto advertises it as simply a “much admired play,” though references to “historie, adventures, and fortunes,” as well as “strange and worthy accidents,” certainly smack of romance. The story of Apollonius of Tyre was the most popular (at least in the Renaissance) of the Greek romances written in the first centuries of the Common Era, though with roots stretching back earlier in both written and oral traditions. These romances – including also Heliodorus’s Ethiopica and Longus’s Daphnis and Chloe – had a shaping influence on early Christian writing, including not only apocryphal acts of various apostles (Thomas, Peter, Paul, Philip, and many others), but also the canonical Acts of the Apostles.37 Shakespeare is unlikely to have understood the historical intertextual relationship between Acts and the Greek romances, but it is clear in his layering of the adventures of Paul over those of Pericles/Apollonius that he sensed their generic affinities.

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In Pericles, Shakespeare’s allusions to Paul have more depth than just shared geography or generic conventions; these alone would not seem enough to explain the addition of a biblical backdrop to the secular romance. By layering references to Paul into the play, Shakespeare enables the narrative and emotive power of conversion. Paul’s story begins, famously, with a dramatic conversion experience, which provided later Christians with one of the seminal models of religious conversion: the “Road to Damascus” experience. Pericles’s transformative experience near the end of the play is also a kind of conversion, though critics have not tended to think of it in these terms. Pericles thinks his wife is dead, which is why he was willing for her body to be cast into the sea; he thinks his daughter is dead too, since he was told by Cleon and Dionyza, her foster parents, that she died in Tarsus. From this point on, Gower tells us, Pericles covers himself in sackcloth, vows (with an echo of Samson the Nazarite) never “to wash his face or cut his hairs” (4.4.28), and lapses into a catatonic silence. Once again applying the image of storms at sea, Gower says of Pericles, “to sea he bears / A tempest which his mortal vessel bears / And yet he rides it out” (4.4.29–31). In this case, rather than a ship being threatened by a storm, the tempest is inside of Pericles, and the ship bears both him and his storm. When he arrives at Mytilene, Helicanus informs the governor, Lysimachus, that Pericles has not spoken for three months. Lysimachus has just had his own conversion experience in the brothel. When Marina is offered to him by Bolt and the Bawd, his crass assessment – “Faith, she would serve after a long voyage at sea” (4.5.49–50) – is loaded with irony, since Marina, even before her attempted murder and kidnapping by pirates, had sighed “This world to me is a lasting storm” (4.1.18). Furthermore, even his exclamation is ironic, since Marina’s unshakable faith in honor and virtue is about to expel his sexual desires, as it has several gentlemen before him. Lysimachus is converted by conversation: “Had I brought hither a corrupted mind / Thy speech had altered it” (4.5.108–9). This gives him the idea (or rather one of his lords gives it to him) that Marina might be able to help Pericles, by “bringing a battery through his deafened ports / Which now are midway stopped” (5.1.39–40). When she arrives, she first tries music, as Cerimon did with Thaisa, but on Pericles it has no effect. Words do work, however. Marina’s first request to Pericles to “lend ear” gets nothing more than a grunt and (perhaps) some violence, but when she protests that she “hath endured a grief / Might equal yours, if both were justly weighed,” mentioning Fortune, her ancestors, and parentage, he speaks, “My fortunes – parentage – good parentage – / To equal mine. Was it not thus? What say you?” (5.1.88–9). Marina continues to

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draw him out, and he responds at increasingly greater length, finally asking her to “tell thy story” (5.1.125). As she gets “to th’ bottom” of her story and reveals her name and his own, Pericles is restored. A “great sea of joys” threatens to drown him (albeit sweetly), and he describes himself as having been begotten by the daughter he himself begot: “Thou that beget’st him that did thee beget” (5.1.182, 185). And at this point Pericles hears heavenly “music of the spheres” (5.1.217), once again recalling the healing music of Cerimon. As Sarah Beckwith observes, “it is the agency of the human voice that is the medium of redemption” in Pericles.38 Pericles is spoken back to life, to humanity. For those who have in mind dramatic paintings of Paul’s conversion, such as those of Caravaggio, Rubens, and Murillo, the experience is all about the stunning “light from heaven” and Paul’s falling to the ground. According to the biblical account, however, it is the words of Jesus and the conversation Paul has with him that is most decisive. Using Paul’s preconversion name, Jesus says, “Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me,” and Paul asks in reply, “Who art thou Lord?” The reply comes immediately: “I am Jesus whome thou persecutest: it is hard for thee to kick against the pricks” (Acts 9:4–5). Key to the exchange seems to be the naming of names: “Saul, Saul” and “I am Jesus.” The same is true of the climactic scene in Pericles: “I am Marina”; “Thou little knowst how thou dost startle me / To call thyself Marina”; “I am the daughter to King Pericles”; “I am Pericles of Tyre” (5.1.133, 137–8, 169, 194). Words are also key to one of the other most influential conversion experiences in the Christian tradition. In his Confessions, St. Augustine describes his conversion as he is sitting under a fig tree tormented by his guilty conscience. Suddenly, he hears the voice of a child (“like that of a boy or girl, I know not which”), chanting over and over “Take up and read. Take up and read” (in Latin, Tolle, lege). Augustine rushes to pick up a copy of Paul’s Epistles, lets it fall open randomly, and he reads from Romans: “Not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and impurities, not in strife and envying; but put you on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh in its concupiscences.”39 Augustine then turns to his friend Alypius, recounts his experience, and brings about his conversion too. Then they go to see Augustine’s mother, Monica, who was a Christian long before; they relate their stories, and they all rejoice. In the Confessions, as Molly Murray puts it, “becoming a Christian requires not just the receipt of grace, but also a renegotiation of relationships with friends, family, and teachers. Augustine’s narrative as a whole presents two inextricable turns: a radical reorientation of mind, and a radical redirection

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of life, signaled by a crossing of church borders.”40 If Shakespeare had read Augustine’s Confessions it would have been in Latin, since an English translation wasn’t printed until 1620 (and then at the Catholic press at St. Omer), but it is possible. Certainly, the Confessions was well known to rough contemporaries (and better Latinists) such as William Alabaster and John Donne; it was available in Erasmus’s edition of Augustine’s works (many times reprinted over the sixteenth century); and Augustine’s conversion experience was frequently cited and recounted in sermons and many printed works.41 Paul’s, and Augustine’s, conversions were central to the larger history of Christianity and were frequently invoked as templates for the personal Christian life; Pericles’s references to Paul’s conversion most certainly invite the audience to understand the play’s story through this biblical narrative. One final element to add to Pericles’s intertextual nexus lies in the dramatic inheritance of Shakespeare’s play. Critics have long argued that Pericles, like many other Shakespeare plays, was influenced by medieval religious drama, specifically (in this case) the miracle or saint’s play. That only a tiny handful of such plays survives has perhaps hampered critical recognition of their influence. In fact, such plays dominated English medieval dramatic performances and were far more representative than the biblical cycles that often receive more critical attention.42 Scholars of early modern drama have also come to realize that literary history is skewed by focusing on the cycle plays on the one hand, and London public theaters on the other. The performance of religious plays outside of London lasted well into the seventeenth century, and even in the London theaters, biblical plays were, if not a major part of the repertory, at least not uncommon.43 Among the surviving saint plays are The Conversion of St. Paul and Mary Magdalene, both included in Digby Manuscript 133, now in the Bodleian. The manuscript was in the library of Sir Kenelm Digby that was donated to the Bodleian in 1634, but it seems the original manuscript contained only Mary Magdalene (among some scientific treatises), and that it was broken up at some point to add The Conversion of St. Paul and other plays. Both of the saint’s plays (along with a partial text of Wisdom) are signed by Miles Blomefield, a Cambridge-educated physician and alchemist, who was born in Bury St. Edmunds and lived most of his later life in Chelmsford, Essex. He is known to have had a substantial library. The origins of the play manuscripts are uncertain: they may have come from Bury St. Edmunds (from which the complete text of Wisdom in the Macro Manuscript comes), or alternatively from a playbook that is known to have been kept by the churchwardens at Chelmsford (one of whom, from 1582 to 1590, was

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Blomefield), where plays were staged in the 1570s and 1580s.44 If the history of the manuscripts of The Conversion of St. Paul and Mary Magdalene is full of mysteries, the performance history of the plays is a complete blank, though the evidence of three different hands in the Paul play suggests at least two different performances some years apart. An obviously inserted scene featuring the devils Belial and Mercury is in a later hand than the original, dating from perhaps the 1550s, the original dating from earlier in the century. Several scholars have observed possible connections between these plays and Pericles. Howard Felperin noted the obvious antique medievalism of Shakespeare’s late play, most strikingly in its resurrection of Gower (whose tomb was in the Bankside St. Saviour’s Church, now Southwark Cathedral, where Shakespeare’s brother Edmund was buried), but also in the use of dumb shows and the chorus figure, who is not really a classical “chorus,” strictly speaking, but the presenter figure from medieval drama.45 The Conversion of St. Paul uses exactly this device, and it is especially interesting that the presenter is labeled “Poeta,” since Shakespeare’s presenter (Gower) is a poet too. The parallels in plot between Shakespeare’s play and Mary Magdalene have also been noted by David Hoeniger in his Arden edition of Pericles. Peter Womack offers a compact summary of the shared plot elements: In both, a monarch is shown on a ship at sea with his wife, who dies in childbirth in the midst of a storm. The sailors, believing that it is fatally unlucky to have a corpse on board, insist that the dead woman be jettisoned; the monarch loses both wife and child, but later both are miraculously restored to him.46

Womack’s subtle and sophisticated intertextual study notes that all these plot elements are also in Gower, and that the ancient sources of both Mary Magdalene and Pericles are multiple and diffuse, so that the narrative “rhyme” they share implies no direct relationship. Yet, while Womack’s argument is compelling, the “rhymes” between Pericles and The Conversion of St. Paul (the biblical plot of which, as we have seen, lies beneath much of Shakespeare’s play) make the possibility of Shakespeare having seen the Digby Manuscript, or the plays, still more tantalizing. (The survival of these plays in only a single manuscript does not mean that others were not in circulation, and records of performance are even more unreliable. Shakespeare’s knowledge of medieval drama has been well established, but how he came by this knowledge remains unknown, and the argument that it all stemmed from a childhood experience of the Coventry Cycle

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seems untenable and unnecessary, since religious plays were widely performed long after the cycles were suppressed.) In any case, even without a more solid intertextual link between Pericles and the Digby plays, the “rhyming” that Womack describes goes beyond plot to include genre and mode, as he himself recognizes, noting (after acknowledging the overlap between Greek romance and Christian martyr stories) that “romance and miracle are separable but not separate manifestations of a common repertoire of plots and plot devices.”47 Both Digby plays, for instance, include elements of romance (St. Paul features the god Mercury, though in this Christian play reduced to a devil, and Mary Magdalene sea voyages and miracles).48 They are also conversion plays. And so, in a sense, is Pericles, though his conversion is not to Christianity, or a specific version of it (Protestant or Catholic), but to himself, his family, and the world. The Greek word for conversion used in the Bible (and especially by Paul) is metanoia (Matthew 4:17, Acts 2:38). While sometimes translated rather polemically in English Bibles as “repentance” (or even more so as poenitentem agite, “do penance,” in the Latin Vulgate), the term means more literally a change of mind. The Latin convertere, with its root meaning of “turn,” better captures the sense of the Greek. Pericles experiences a change of mind, in this sense, but there are many other turnings as the play moves to its close. Pericles must also literally turn to Marina to hear her story, and he then calls on her, “turn your eyes upon me” (5.1.92). More figuratively, he turns back or returns to life, as well as returning to both his daughter and (with Diana’s help) his wife, in what he calls “this great miracle” (5.3.59). The effect of the play may be described as a secular version of the religious turn, a theatrical experience of conversion that depends in part upon the audience’s familiarity with the prototypical conversion of Paul on the road to Damascus, and the conversion plays of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. If Shakespeare’s Pericles is a kind of miracle play, the miracles it stages are ultimately not like those experienced by the Apostle Paul, Mary Magdalene, or the early saints. Thaisa’s resurrection, the preservation and recovery of Marina, and the restoration to life of Pericles are wondrous, but not in a supernatural sense. Thaisa never really dies, Marina (however luckily) is preserved by pirates and her own virtue and persuasive powers, and Pericles is restored – converted – by his recognition of the suffering, the humanity, the language, the flesh and blood, that he shares with his daughter. Without the intervention of the goddess Diana, of course, father and daughter would not have been reunited with their wife and mother, but even her appearance takes place within the relative ordinariness of

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a dream. The deep layer of biblical allusions in the play adds resonance to the experience of wonder it delivers, for those in the audience who know the stories of Jonah, Jesus, and Paul and the lessons they provide. If Pericles does not represent these biblical characters in any perfect sense, the allusive undercurrents nevertheless provide his adventures with at least a theatrical equivalent of the miraculous.

chapter 9

Finding Pygmalion in the Bible: Classical and Biblical Allusion in The Winter’s Tale Richard Strier

The final scene of The Winter’s Tale is probably the most spectacular ending in Shakespeare. Interpretation of it, of course, varies, as does evaluation. But perhaps the most troubling claim to be made about this scene is that it was tacked onto a play that did not originally include it. If this were true, the scene could be a late inspiration, or perhaps something that Shakespeare added for “literary” effect; or the addition could suggest, as the phrase “tacked on” does, that the ending is not organically related to the rest of the play.1 The composition issue, however, might never have arisen – though critics could still have been divided on the scene’s value and meaning – if we did not have a rare contemporary account of seeing this play. Recording a performance at the Globe in May 1611, Simon Forman gives a fairly accurate account of the main plot of the play (though minus Mamillius), ending the summary with the recognition of Perdita (“she was known to be Leontes’s daughter, and was then sixteen years old”). He adds a paragraph about Autolycus and his exploits, which Forman apparently found of great interest and which he moralized upon (“Beware of trusting feigned beggars”).2 But he says not a word about the final scene as we have it in the 1623 Folio.3 One would think that the (supposed) animation, on stage, of a (supposed) statue would have stuck in his memory and merited comment – for better or worse. And so the addition theory comes into being.4 Whether one admires the scene or not, or whether one thinks of it as integral to the play or not, virtually all critics and scholars (barring the nonStratfordians) would agree that only Shakespeare would have thought of using the most famous story of the animation of a statue – the Pygmalion story in Ovid’s Metamorphoses – as a substitute for the rather confused ending of his narrative source text, Robert Greene’s Pandosto. Shakespeare had to do something with Greene’s abrupt ending in which, “to close up the comedy with a tragical stratagem,” Pandosto, the Leontes figure, commits suicide after a serious bout of lust for his daughter.5 Yet certainly 156

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Shakespeare did not have to go so far afield as a story about a statue to devise a more appropriate conclusion. He could simply have downplayed the father’s lust, as he does, and allowed his formerly jealous king to live on in benign contemplation of the young lovers and the newly assured succession. Instead, we get Pygmalion (or a simulacrum thereof). This might simply show that Shakespeare always had Ovid in mind, particularly the Metamorphoses.6 That would probably be a fair observation (as Holofernes puts it in Love’s Labour’s Lost, “Ovidius Naso was the man”).7 But this chapter will try to show that the Bible came into Shakespeare’s mind as readily as Ovid did, and that one of the remarkable things that we can see in this play is the way in which the classical and the biblical mingled for him, such that a motif in one brought up the other. The syncretism of The Winter’s Tale is not just in its religious position – which I have attempted to treat elsewhere – but in its use of sources as well.8 Ovid might be more prominent, but when we see the presence of the Bible in the play, we can answer the question raised earlier – was the statue scene intended all along? – and we can also gain some interpretive traction on that much-discussed coup de théâtre. More broadly, by looking at particular cases, we can gain some insight into how Shakespeare uses his biblical allusions. The most straightforward and unmistakable biblical allusion in the play occurs at the end of the second act when Leontes, convinced of his wife’s infidelity, threatens to have his new daughter killed. Responding to moral pressure from his courtiers, who “all kneel” to dissuade Leontes from having the infant “consumed with fire” (2.3.151, 132), Leontes decides on a substitute course which both lets the infant live and does not (as he says in successive lines, “Let it live. / It shall not neither” [2.3.155–6]).9 A major courtier, Antigonus, agrees to do whatever Leontes commands – though not the impossible or ignoble (“Anything . . . That my ability may undergo, / And nobleness impose” [2.3.161–3]) – including giving up his own life, to save the infant. Relying on Antigonus’s oath of service (“As thou art liegeman to us” [2.3.172]), as well as on a threat of death to Antigonus and his wife if the courtier were to balk at following the yetunknown command, Leontes gives Antigonus a charge. The king orders “On thy soul’s peril” (presumably for disobedience to a king) “and thy body’s torture” (a new wrinkle) to take the baby to “some remote and desert place, quite out / Of our dominions” and abandon it there, “strangely” (2.3.174–80). Antigonus accepts this command as binding. It does save the infant from death by burning or from having its brains dashed out (2.3.138–40), though he comments ironically that “a present death / Had

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been more merciful” (2.3.182–3). How fully we are to consider Antigonus as morally compromised by his obedience to Leontes’s command is a deep and interesting question, though not one for the present chapter.10 What is immediately relevant is the next thing that Antigonus says. Speaking to the infant, he wishes that “Some powerful spirit instruct the kites and ravens / To be thy nurses” (2.3.184–5). The lines that follow this revert to classical contexts (Romulus and Remus and others), though with some skepticism – “Wolves and bears, they say, / Casting their savageness aside, have done / Like offices of pity” (2.3.185–7 [italics mine]). But the wish itself, with its invocation of a “powerful spirit,” clearly relies on a biblical allusion. The editors who have acknowledged the presence of this allusion have done so only tentatively.11 I think, though, that we can be reasonably certain that Shakespeare intended the allusion to be registered as such even if we must also acknowledge that he knew that some of his audience would not pick it up. What would the auditors/ spectators who did not catch the allusion have understood? Although they did not recognize the particular biblical passage, nonetheless the general religious dimension of the lines would have been clear to them. When Paulina wishes that “Jove send” the newborn infant “A better guiding spirit” than the deranged Leontes, she seems simply to be calling for a more normal human nurturance (2.3. 124–5). “Jove send” does not seem to have much content. But “Some powerful spirit” is unmistakably transcendental; it is a “guiding spirit” that has a special relation to and dominion over the animals (“instruct the kites and ravens”). The lines invoke, or at least call for, a providential context, opening up that possibility. No particular knowledge is necessary to see (and feel) this. But what of those who did get the biblical reference? The reference – signaled by the distinctive image of ravens as nurses – is to the beginning of Chapter 17 of the Book of Kings. In this famous episode the prophet Elijah is fed by ravens. Shakespeare’s phrasing echoes that of the Bible, in which “the worde of the Lord . . . commanded the ravens” to feed Elijah in the foreign region to which he was commanded to go (I Kings 17:1–6).12 Recognizing the allusion would make the providential suggestion of Shakespeare’s text much stronger, yet would do so without breaking the pre-Christian framework that Shakespeare carefully maintains, with Apollo as the reigning deity. One of the advantages of biblical allusion is that it can bring in the Bible thematically without interfering with the diegesis. Once Elijah is present in the consciousness of an auditor or reader, the possibility of miracles is

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underlined. The marginal gloss in the Geneva Bible for this verse states that “To strengthen his [Elijah’s] faith against persecution, God promiseth to fede him miraculously.” Moreover, anyone who thought of Elijah would be thinking of the God of the entire narrative (or “historical”) portion of the Hebrew Bible, since Elijah’s experience echoes that of Moses – the miraculous raven-brought food morning and evening recalls the quails and manna of Exodus (16:4–36). This parallel would most probably be present to an auditor or reader who caught the initial allusion, since the parallels between Elijah’s experience and that of Moses are systematic. For instance, in another instance of miraculous feeding, Elijah is fed for forty days and forty nights in the wilderness before he has a revelation on a mountain (Horeb) that parallels that of Moses on Mount Sinai (see I Kings 19:1–18 and Exodus 33). But if this association of Elijah and Moses raises the idea of miracles in fairly general terms, there is also something more specific going on – something that helps us understand the dynamics of the final scene of The Winter’s Tale. When Shakespeare makes an allusion – and this is perhaps true of most literary allusions – it is productive to look at the entire context of the allusion, and not just at the particular word, phrase, or image to which we are pointed. The auditor or reader who caught the allusion to I Kings might well have remembered the whole (chapter 17) that begins with the ravens. Elijah is not only a miracle-experiencing figure but also a miracle-performing one. The bulk of chapter 17 is concerned not with the ravens who fed Elijah but with the widow who did (Elijah is commanded to go to Sidon, where, God tells the prophet, “I have commanded a widowe there to sustaine thee” [17:9]). The mite that the pious widow brings is miraculously turned into food that sustains the widow, the prophet, and her household during a sustained dry period (I Kings 17: 10–16). Yet this is not the major miracle of the chapter. The widow’s son fell sick and “his sicknes was so sore, that there was no breath left in him” (17:17). What follows next is the first reanimation of the dead in the Bible. The now grieving widow questions and regrets her relation to the prophet (“art thou come unto me to call my sinne to remembrance, and to slay my sonne?” [17:18]). Elijah responds by taking the corpse into his own chamber, laying it on his bed, stretching himself on the body three times, and calling upon the Lord to “let this childes soule come into him again.” Which it does. “And Eliáh toke the childe, and broght him downe out of the chamber into the house, and delivered him unto his mother, and Eliáh said, Beholde, thy sonne liveth” (17:23).

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So the context of Shakespeare’s allusion to nurturing ravens brings with it the association or the image of the reanimation of a body in which “there was no breath.” This is the first hint in the play that such a thing is possible, and that such a thing is on Shakespeare’s mind. But how does this lead him to Pygmalion – or suggest that he already had the Pygmalion story in mind, even at this point in the play? The answer to this is also found in the Book of Kings. I have already suggested that Kings is a book of parallels. The biblically aware reader would undoubtedly be aware of the greatest and most obvious one: the parallel, strongly insisted on in the text, between Elijah and his successor, Elisha, who receives the mantle of Elijah (1 Kings 19:19; 2 Kings 1:13–14). (The division into First and Second Kings is arbitrary; the narrative is basically continuous.) Elisha redoes Elijah’s miracles, the first being the Moses-like parting of the waters on receiving the mantle. He also redoes Elijah’s reanimation. After some false starts when he tries to use his servant as a surrogate miracle-worker, Elisha reanimates the son of a Shunammite woman who he has enabled (like Sarah in Genesis 18) to bear a son in old age: Then came Elishá into the house, and beholde, the childe was dead, and layed upon his bed. He went therefore, and shut the dore upon them twaine, and prayed unto the Lord. After he went up, and lay upon the childe, and put his mouth on his mouth, and his hands upon his hands, and stretched himselfe upon him, & the fleshe of the childe waxed warm. (2 Kings 4:32–4)

This is the moment, I think, in which we can see that Shakespeare already had the Pygmalion story in mind when he alluded to the miracles of the two prophets in Kings. He saw the parallels between these biblical reanimations and the animated statue of the Metamorphoses. In Ovid’s poem, Venus, the agent of the transformation of Pygmalion’s statue, caused her fire to “spyre thrice upward in the ayre” (emphasis mine) while Pygmalion was praying for a wife “like” his “wench of ivory” (though, as Venus sees, really wanting the wife to be the wench of ivory); this parallels Elijah’s stretching himself on the body of the widow’s dead child three times. But the detail, I think, that generated the connection even more strongly is “the fleshe of the childe waxed warm.” In the Pygmalion story, as in the prophetic reanimations, the living person makes intimate bodily contact with the inanimate one. After seeing the sign of the thrice-kindled holy fire, “streyght way Pygmalion did repayre / Unto the image of his wench, and leaning on the bed / Did kisse her.” In his translation, Arthur Golding emphasizes the warmth of this animation by setting apart a half line by punctuation: “In hir body streyght a warmenesse seemd too spred.” This

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is a brilliant translation of Ovid’s equally set apart “visa tepere est.”13 In both cases, warmth is the key. When, in Ovid and Golding, “the Ivory wexed soft,” the analogy is to “wax made soft ageinst the Sunne.” Three moments of reanimation, in ancient, pre-Christian, corrupt kingdoms, came together in Shakespeare’s mind. As soon, I think, as we had the ravens, we had Elijah and Elisha – and Pygmalion. There are many other moments that make it clear – in retrospect only – that the statue scene was intended by Shakespeare all along (or at least by the end of the second act) as the finale of the play. The sense that animation is a special kind of miracle is present in Paulina’s bitter mock-challenge to Leontes about the death of Hermione: If you can bring Tincture or lustre in her lip, her eye, Heat outwardly or breath within, I’ll serve you (3.2.201–4) As I would do the gods.

Breath is crucial in the biblical account of Elisha’s reanimation of the Shunammite boy, and we have seen that “heat” is crucial in all of the animations. What is striking about Paulina’s challenge is the detail – comparable to that in the Bible or in Ovid – in which it imagines the process that it asserts to be (humanly) impossible. Shakespeare knows that he can represent this process, and that he, at least apparently, will. He wants the sacred to be present in the play – again, diegetically, in what appears to be a strictly classical context. The oracle sent by Apollo is a blunt and straightforward message, but the description of the moment of first receiving the oracle at the shrine of Delphos (meaning Delos, but perhaps implicating Delphi as well) is as close as Shakespeare ever comes to describing an actual encounter with the sacred.14 Nature is benign at the oracle (“the air most sweet,” etc.) and the priests behave in a comely fashion (“ceremonious, solemn, and unearthly”) (3.1.1, 7). But all that was nothing to the mysterium tremendum, “the burst / And the ear-deafening voice o’th’ oracle, / Kin to Jove’s thunder,” which has the effect of momentarily eliminating the human witness’s sense of individual existence. It “so surpris’d my sense,” says Cleomenes, “That I was nothing” (3.1.8–11). The reference to Kings in the line about the ravens is indubitable, and serves to charge The Winter’s Tale with a potential for the miraculous. In a different vein, the Elijah–Elisha story might have contributed to another moment in the play that has caused a good deal of critical perplexity: the bear that famously pursues Antigonus off the stage (3.3.57 SD). Shakespeare seems to have taken bears both seriously (as in “Thou’dst

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shun a bear” in King Lear) and comically (as in “a bush supposed a bear” in A Midsummer Night’s Dream); the bear in The Winter’s Tale seems to be the bear of tragicomedy.15 Interestingly, tragicomic associations with bears can be drawn from a puzzling moment in 2 Kings, in a chapter that appears shortly before the story of Elisha’s reanimation of the Shunammite’s son. At the end of the second chapter of 2 Kings, when Elisha is on his way to Bethel, after having performed another Moses-like miracle in purifying some undrinkable waters (2:19–22; compare Exodus 15:23–5), “little children came out of the citie and mocked him” for his baldness – perhaps a sign of mourning for Elijah – for which Elisha “cursed them in the Name of the Lord.” In response to this, “two beares came out of the forest, and tare in pieces two and fourtie children of them” (2 Kings 2:23–4). Like Elijah, Elisha seems to have a special relation to nonhuman creatures. Nothing is made of this episode in the Bible, but Shakespeare may have remembered it – J. H. Pafford, in his note on the stage direction, claims the episode was “well known”16 – and Shakespeare may have intended it to bring into the tragicomedy of the scene an element of divine retribution. Antigonus may or may not have deserved his gruesome fate of being devoured by a bear, but an unnamed court Gentleman in the fifth act of the play, on hearing the story of the death of Antigonus and of the wreck of the ship that brought Perdita to where she was abandoned in Bohemia, notes that “all the instruments which aided to expose the child were even then lost” (5.2.69–71). This sounds like divine vengeance, though not quite as apparently weird and disproportionate as that in the Elisha story. But if Kings was on his mind, Shakespeare may have remembered Elisha’s bears, the only moment when bears actually enter a biblical narrative (though they are mentioned as models of ferocity in a number of places). Moreover, the tonality of the bear moment in Kings may be just as indeterminate as that of the parallel moment in Shakespeare’s play. If the tragicomic bear evokes a specific biblical incident, the play accrues more subtle and generalized threads of biblical tonality that will converge in the culminating scene. It is hard to believe, for instance, that the famous dialogue on art and nature at the sheep-shearing festival was written without the intention to raise the issues in a less abstract, more biblically based way in the final scene. Perdita’s dislike of “art” as a falsification of nature is not obviously biblical, yet there is something like a sense of violation of the sacred in her horror at anything that interferes with or purports to add to the workings of “great creating Nature” (4.4.88). She is unmoved by Polixenes’s mediating position (“the art itself is Nature” [4.4.97]), and significantly shifts the point of reference from plant to human

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reproduction. Like Marvell’s mower against gardens, though perhaps more intuitively, she links grafting with human corruption, especially sexual corruption. The mower associates grafting with cosmetics (“The tulip, white, did for complexion seek; / And learned to interline its cheek”), as does Perdita.17 Perdita expresses horror at the idea of a lover so jaded that only cosmetics would stimulate his erotic impulses, that only were she “painted” would her lover “desire to breed” by her (4.4.101–3). Procreation and (human) creation must be kept sharply apart, away from “th’ adulteries of art.”18 There are no biblical references here, but the connection between “art” and violations of the sacred, and between violations of the sacred and sexual immorality, bring us, potentially, deep into biblical territory. The Bible has a strong antitechnological strain – think of the rejection of the offering of the “tiller of the grounde,” Cain (Genesis 4:2); of the tower of Babel (Genesis 5:1–5); and of the repeated injunctions against polluting God’s altar with tools (Exodus 20:25, Deuteronomy 27:5, I Kings 6:7). Idols are always connected to human art – they are “graven images” (Exodus 20:4, Leviticus 26:1, Deuteronomy 5:8). And idolatry is regularly, systematically, correlated with debased sexuality, with “whoring after their gods” (Exodus 34:15), “as the house of Ahab went whoring” (2 Chronicles 21:13). The only woman in the Bible who is described – again in the Book of Kings – as having used cosmetics and “peinted her face” was a major player in the “house of Ahab,” Jezebel (2 Kings 30).19 But something is needed to make these potential connections active in the text. Perdita’s comments, after all, remain purely within the framework of humanistic anti-artificiality and praise of the “natural.” Shakespeare will activate the biblical connections later. But he keeps the Bible in our eyes, minds, and ears. When, toward the end of the fourth act, Autolycus is reveling in his successes as a “cutpurse,” he chortles, “I see this is the time that the unjust man doth thrive” (4.4.677–8). The phrasing is meant to sound biblical – the contrast between the just and the unjust runs through the Bible from Genesis (“Noah was a just and upright man” [Genesis 6:9]) to Revelation (“He that is unjust, let him be unjust stil” [Revelation 22:11]). The point of Autolycus’s biblical phrasing here is the same as the point of the psalmist who says, “I have sene the wicked strong, & spreading him self like a grene bay tre” (37:35);20 the psalmist assures or reminds us that this is a temporary situation, that, as the next verses of the thirty-seventh psalm make plain, such thriving or flourishing cannot last. The universe is not constituted that way – nor, as we are already starting to feel at this juncture, is The Winter’s Tale. The play has taken a radical turn in its genre, and the story of madness, destructive jealousy, and misuse of power that

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constituted the first half has clearly (with the shepherds, the rescue of the abandoned infant, the bear, Father Time, and the sheep-shearing scene with its many subscenes) turned into something else. But Shakespeare has to try to tie everything together. He has managed the plot in such a way that all the characters are either on their way to or about to be on their way to the location of the play’s first half, Leontes’s court in Sicily. The first half of the play ended with Leontes dedicating himself to the “exercise,” as he said, of perpetual penitence (3.2. 235–40). He seems to have done so, since his virtuously disobedient counselor, Camillo, refers to Leontes, sixteen years later, as “the penitent king” (4.2.6–7).21 This may or may not be an ethical and spiritual triumph, a “saint-like sorrow,” as one of Leontes’s courtiers says (5.1.2), and Leontes may or may not have recreated himself through making tears his “recreation” (3.2.237).22 But in any case, the happy ending of the play does not simply parallel those of the Greek tales or novels that we call “romances” or of their Renaissance offshoots. The family reunions characteristic of “romance” endings do occur: Perdita is revealed to be the long-lost daughter (abandoned infant) of Leontes and the childhood and adult friendship between the two kings – ruptured by Leontes’s jealousy – is restored (5.2. 30–57). But none of this is shown. It is entirely narrated, and in prose. Shakespeare wants to distance us from its affective and plot-resolving power. He does not want this play to culminate the way Pericles does, with a magnificently elaborate and drawn-out father–daughter reunion.23 Like the Second Gentleman, to whom these events are narrated, we have been deprived of “a sight which was to be seen, cannot be spoken of” (5.2. 41–2). Shakespeare clearly has something else in mind for the ending of this romance; it will not end “like an old tale” but in some other way. Shakespeare begins to show his hand. He introduces the topic of Perdita’s mother’s statue, attributing the work to a known “Italian master,” Giulio Romano. He has the Gentleman tell us and his friend that the whole witnessing audience of “kings and princes” has followed Perdita – gone in “all greediness of affection” to see her mother’s likeness – to an especially private section of Paulina’s gallery, where this statue is kept (5.2.78–101). Shakespeare has thus returned us to the question of art versus nature, since Romano is said to “beguile Nature of her custom” – if, that is, he “could put breath into his work” (5.2.97, 96). The entire court party is silenced at seeing the figure of Hermione. Paulina calls, decorously and also deeply appropriately, for Leontes to speak first. This is where Shakespeare begins to release the Bible into the action, and to pick up on the biblical matrices that he introduced

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directly in the reference to Elijah and indirectly in the controversy over the impiousness of artifice. As the passage on Giulio Romano suggested, the work of art in question is an extremely realistic portrayal of Hermione, showing her “As [if] she lived now” (5.3.32). The focus is on the object as such, as an inanimate thing. Leontes says: “O, thus she stood, / Even with such life of majesty – warm life, / As now it coldly stands” (5.3.34–6). The thing in question is an “it” rather than a “she,” coldly standing rather than manifesting “warm life.” The next words that Leontes says manifest his penitent and perhaps recreated status. In his first speech on seeing the thing, he had, after marveling at its naturalism, said, “Chide me, dear stone,” but then showed how fully he remembers exactly who Hermione was in saying “thou art she / In thy not chiding” (5.3.24–6). Here he repeats the withdrawn request, expressing his penitence more fully, imagining that the chiding he had asked for is happening. He says, “I am ashamed. Does not the stone rebuke me” (5.3.37). This repetition should assure that, for those who have the knowledge, another biblical echo is unmistakable. Stones crying out are an allusion, most famously a New Testament one. On the way to Jerusalem, Jesus had said, in response to “some of the Pharises” complaining about Jesus’s followers proclaiming “with a loud voice” the “great workes that thei had sene,” that “if they shulde hold their peace, the stones would crye” (Luke 19:37–40). However, this is not actually the most relevant biblical passage. As with the ravens and the resurrection passages, Shakespeare is keeping his direct biblical allusions to Old Testament ones, perhaps hewing to an implied parallel chronology. The true allusion is to a passage in Habakkuk (one that Jesus certainly knew). The prophet had said of the wicked that “the stone shal crye out of the wall” to rebuke them (Habakkuk 2:11). This is addressed specifically to “Thou” who “hast consulted shame to thine owne house, by destroying manie people, and hast sinned against thine owne soule” (2:10). It would be hard to find a more concise and precise account of what Leontes has done, including the haunting and mysterious last phrase. Whatever sinning against one’s own soul is, it seems fair to say that Leontes has done this – and knows it. In bringing shame to his house and destroying many people – his son, his wife, Antigonus, the mariners, and (as he thought) his infant daughter – he truly betrayed everything that was best in him, in particular his love for his friend, his wife, and his son (not to mention his status as an honorable ruler). Hermione had tried to say something like this to him: “You, my lord, best know … I appeal / To your own conscience” (3.2.31, 44–5).

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But there is more to the allusion than even this, brilliant as it is. Obviously the stone crying out is a miracle, attributing something to an inanimate thing that only an animate one can do. So we are brought back to this fundamental contrast. As the scene progresses, the lifelikeness of the “image” becomes more and more of a problem. Perdita risks an act that, as she says, might seem to be “superstition” (5.3.43). Polixenes admires the skill involved in the thing being so “Masterly done” that “the very life seems warm upon her lip” (5.3.65–6), but Leontes, who also notes the impression of animation – “Would you not deem it breathed” (5.3.64) – feels bitterly that “we are mocked with art” (5.3.68). Leontes is enjoying the “affliction” that the thing produces in him – another sign, perhaps, of his recreated state (he is given some beautiful poetry: “this affliction has a taste as sweet / As any cordial comfort” [5.3.76–7]) – but he begins to act in a truly mad way, and starts to makes an erotic advance on the thing: “Let no man mock me, / For I will kiss her” (5.3.79–80).24 Paulina puts a stop to this by reminding him about art, and about the (as we have been told) condition of the thing as “newly performed” (5.2.94) – that is, completed by painting. Paulina states of the thing that “Her lip is wet,” and tells Leontes that he would “mar it if you kiss it,” and moreover, she warns him, he would “stain your own [lips] / With oily painting” (5.3.81–3). Art here becomes a matter of visceral disgust. We are brought back to Perdita’s sense of the unnatural sexuality produced by painted women. Paulina does more in the scene than preventing the thing from being kissed (Perdita had attempted to kiss its hand). Paulina will, like one of the title characters in a different work by Robert Greene, make a statue do things, though Paulina insists that, unlike Friar Bacon, she is not “assisted / By wicked powers” (5.3.90–1).25 Like her namesake, Paulina insists on the great, specifically biblical virtue; she tells the newly passive Leontes (and “all,” onstage and off): “It is required / You do awake your faith” (5.3.94–5). She calls upon music to charm, Orpheus or Amphion-like, the normally unresponsive or inanimate, saying “Music, awake her,” and she commands the thing to “be stone no more” (5.3.98–9), to become animate and “bequeath to death your numbness” (5.3.102). She once again insists that her “spell is lawful” (5.3.105), and, finally, we get the Pygmalion and Elisha moment: “O, she’s warm!” (5.3.109). The Hermione figure passionately embraces Leontes (“She hangs about his neck”), but the shrewd counselor, Camillo, insists that the animated figure not only move but also – unlike, say, the image of Helen of Troy in Dr. Faustus – “speak too” (5.3.112–13). Perdita is instructed to “pray [her] mother’s blessing” (5.3.120), which she

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presumably does, and the animate figure of Hermione responds by calling for a blessing on her daughter. This is certainly a wonderful ending. Whatever we are to believe about it – Hermione states that she has “preserved” herself to see the oracle fulfilled and, in a wonderful pun, “the issue” (5.3.127–8) – the scene has been presented as one of animation, of a statue being told to “awake” and “Be stone no more.” Here is where biblical awareness adds a special complexity to the scene. Just as the viewer or reader who caught the reference to Elijah and the ravens would, should, or might (as Shakespeare certainly did) have recalled the resurrection presented later in that chapter, the viewer or reader who caught the reference to Habakkuk and the morally responsive stones would have (or should have, or might have, as Shakespeare certainly did) recalled the end of that chapter in Habakkuk. The chapter concludes, a few verses after “the stone shall crye out,” with a fierce condemnation: “Wo unto him that saith to the wood, Awake, and to the dumme stone, Rise up” (Habbakuk 2:19). The question becomes why Shakespeare would inject into the scene, through the earlier reference and through the striking and no doubt intentional closeness of Paulina’s language to that condemned by the prophet, the issue of idolatry. The Habakkuk passage is a strong one, but is consistent with the entire tenor of the Hebrew Bible from its first mention of graven images. The Reformation, especially in its Swiss varieties, had brought the attack on idolatry of the Hebrew Bible into the fabric of sixteenth-century Christianity.26 Perdita’s worry about the possible “superstition” involved in kneeling to a statue shows her commitment to – or, at least, awareness of – the contemporary (Protestant) version of the biblical critique, a critique that is fully expounded in the longest and most elaborate of the Elizabethan homilies, that “Against Peril of Idolatry.”27 I would argue that the condemnation of idolatry in Habbakuk was as fully in Shakespeare’s mind when he wrote the final scene as was the Pygmalian story and the resurrections conducted by Elijah and Elisha. Shakespeare seems to have seen how fully a humanist awareness of the limits of art runs parallel to the biblical (and Reformation) critique of idolatry. In both cases, the key contrast is between the animate and the inanimate, the living and the dead. Idols are dead and, as the Habbakuk passage insists, dumb; they share two major features: they are “the worke of mens hands,” as the Bible repeatedly states (Psalm 115:4; Deuteronomy 4:28; 2 Kings 19:18; Isaiah 2:8, 37:19), and they are unresponsive – that is the force of “dumb.” Why speak to something that can not speak back? As in Habakkuk, the idolaters are not only immoral but stupid; after

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mocking those who say to idols “awake” and “Rise up,” the prophet adds, ironically, “it shall teache thee.” Pygmalion is a kind of madman (though, in Ovid, a virtuous one). The psalmist is very clear on this: Idols “have a mouthe, and speake not; thei have eyes and se not; Thei have eares and hear not; thei have noses and smell not; Thei have hands and touche not” (Psalm 115:5–7, building on Deuteronomy 4:28). The contrast with works of art (as with idols) is with life – with something that is living and, most of all, responsive. And this brings us to the divine. In the Bible, God is always “the living God” (Deuteronomy 5:26; I Samuel 17:26, 36; 2 Kings 19:4, 16; Matthew 16:16; 2 Corinthians 3:3, 6:1; 1 Thessalonians 1:9 [with a contrast with idols]). When someone needs a divinity that will respond and be a source of wisdom, solace, and protection, an idol will not do. So too, when someone misses and longs for a person, as do Leontes and Perdita, a statue – however “Masterly done”– will not suffice. When one wants or needs a “thou,” an “it” will not do. Seeing the biblical matrix within the humanistic one in the final scene allows us to recognize the humanism within iconoclasm – its valuation of life over art.28 There is no trace of idolatry in a daughter kneeling to her mother, or a husband kissing a wife. “Dear life” redeems these actions. So, odd as it may seem to some, seeing the biblical references in the play, including that to fierce iconoclasm, helps the human meaning of the play emerge even more clearly. “What fine chisel / Could ever yet cut breath?” (5.3.78–9). The play always meant to ask this question – and to answer it.

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Enactment: Hermeneutics and the Social

chapter 10

Shylock in the Lion’s Den: Enacting Exegesis in The Merchant of Venice Shaina Trapedo

In all of Shakespeare’s plays, the name of the prophet Daniel appears in only one scene toward the end of The Merchant of Venice, yet here this name is repeated half a dozen times to great dramatic effect. Portia’s refusal to “wrest once the law to [her] authority” evokes mournful sighs and outrage from the actors and audience, while Shylock cheers, “A Daniel come to judgment! yea, a Daniel! / O wise young judge, how I do honour thee!”1 Moments later, when the suspense of the scene is broken by Portia’s ruling that the Jew may have his “bond” but draw no blood, Antonio’s friend Gratiano heckles Shylock while simultaneously praising Portia. He taunts: “A Daniel, still say I, a second Daniel! / I thank thee, Jew, for teaching me that word” (4.1.337–8). In rapid succession we find the figure of Daniel being exalted by those on opposite sides of the case. The exegetical pliancy of Daniel’s eponymous text – which yields itself to multiple, even contradictory, interpretations – thus animates the play. By raising the stakes of interpretation to the level of life and death, Shakespeare examines the authority ascribed to Scripture and the potentially devastating and all-pervasive consequences of hermeneutic malpractice. The legal and interpretive flexibility on display here is also suggestive of certain fluidity of identity. Although criticism of the play has been largely focused on its anti-Semitism and its audience’s attendant racial prejudices, my efforts here are aligned with recent scholarship that works to break down the dichotomy of Jew/Christian without dissolving the distinction. My approach diverges from scholarly interpretations of The Merchant of Venice that have largely considered the ways that the Jew/Christian binary informs various aspects of the play. This tendency toward establishing binary relations is in keeping with the early modern use of the Daniel story. The biblical Daniel was a young Judean living under Babylonian captivity in the sixth century BC; his life served as an influential paradigm in early modern England, as the struggle to maintain one’s religious identity in 171

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a hostile environment resonated with both Catholics and Protestants during the Reformation. This Daniel paradigm was not one of cultural assimilation, but its opposite: the ability to remain distinct from the larger (corrupt) social world. Daniel’s life resonates throughout The Merchant of Venice on both the grand scale, such as the parallel with Shylock as a Jew residing under gentile rule, and on a more local scale, such as Shylock’s refusal to dine with his gentile neighbors. Indeed, Shylock’s proclamation “I will not eat / With you, drink with you, nor pray with you” (1.3.356–7) echoes Daniel 1:8: “But Daniel purposed in his heart that he would not defile himself with the portion of the kings meat, nor with the wine which he drank.”2 Shylock’s efforts to maintain a distinction of Christian and Jew are in turn paralleled, albeit in more subtle ways, by critical attempts to distinguish between Christian and Jewish hermeneutics in The Merchant of Venice. In her classic essay on early modern reading practices and the play’s biblical references, Barbara Lewalski offers an allegorical reading of the Daniel/Balthasar/Portia figuration, asserting that Daniel, like Portia, extols the Christian virtue of mercy, while Shylock’s conversion affirms a (Christian) belief that the Law – that is, Jewish hermeneutics – is destructive.3 Thomas Luxon similarly looks to the play’s presentation of Shylock’s “self-serving hermeneutics” as a way to draw binary distinctions; Shylock, in Luxon’s reading, affirms the early modern position that although the Jews were the original inheritors of the Bible, since Christ’s advent they have become increasingly stubborn and exegetically incompetent.4 While I agree with Luxon that “Shakespeare’s play so loudly and complexly invokes the stories and teachings of the ancient Hebrew prophet”(8) his mapping of Daniel’s story onto Shakespeare’s script results in overly rigid one-to-one correspondences of Shylock as “typical Jew” and Portia as Daniel the “true Jew” that work against the play’s attentiveness to the mutability and instability of identity. We might seem to encounter this mutability when Janet Adelman, through a vigorous psychoanalytic, historicist reading that examines Jewish–Christian relations without taking a Shylock-centric approach, contends that Shakespeare’s play is motivated by England’s angst over the status of conversos, Spanish or Portuguese Jews who converted to Christianity (such as Queen Elizabeth’s own personal physician) but “who were – maybe – still Jews after all.”5 But if Adelman’s methodology – using biblical commentaries, sermons, and other theological material of the period as a spade to unearth readings of the play that are not readily available to the majority of modern readers – is rigorous and

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productive, in solidifying the relationship between Jew and Christian in terms of blood, her racial account does not permit the ideological flexibility the play affords. While the play does take up the anxiety of Jewish presence in England, it is less concerned with their physical presence than it is with the pervasive presence of Jews through the potency of their Scripture, which early modern Christians encountered on a daily basis. The play’s invocation of Daniel – a Jewish scholar summoned to a foreign court – draws attention to the isomorphisms operating between early modern literature and theology. Elizabethan playgoers, steeped in various forms of Reformation polemic, were likely aware of the analogous tension between the scorning of Jews as the source of the original Christian religion, and the scorning of Catholics as the source of one’s own (Protestant) Christianity. In response to the anxiety of being indebted to earlier claimants, Reformation theologians, writers, and policymakers alike deployed a strategy of legitimating through denunciation.6 Histories of shared inheritance were transformed into polemics that create binary differences. During the dramatic climax of The Merchant of Venice, however, Shakespeare makes a very different move. In a radical departure from the period’s typical uses of the Book of Daniel, Shakespeare uses Antonio’s companion Gratiano to stage what I call the paradox of gratitude. When Gratiano reapplies the term “Daniel” to undermine the Jew, he exclaims “I thank thee, Jew, for teaching me that word” (4.1.355), and even the edge of Gratiano’s sarcasm is overcome by the fact that he is indeed indebted to Shylock for new biblical knowledge. Ever-present in the Christian’s expression of thanks to the Jew at this moment in the play is the admission of dependency and ineptness, which the Gentiles in the Book of Daniel display repeatedly. The rich, provocative, and understudied references to Daniel in Shakespeare’s play invite the audience to consider the shared experience of indebtedness, whether linguistic, cultural, or theological. As I will show, this recognition of indebtedness breaks down traditional divisions and encourages unconventional and experimental interpretive responses, then and now. Shakespeare’s use of Daniel exploits the many ways that this biblical figure and narrative opens areas of hermeneutical fluidity – in the biblical story’s generic flexibility as both drama and prophecy, in the contingent interpretations of law, and in its prominent place within both Christian and Judaic exegesis – in order to produce a corresponding fluidity of religious identity.

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Daniel as Exegetical and Theatrical Subject To consider the place of Daniel in sixteenth-century exegetical culture, we might begin with a flurry of publications on Daniel’s eschatological prophesies. Texts such as the anonymous Here begynneth the Dreams of Daniel (1556), William Birch’s A warnyng to England, let London begin to repent their iniquitie and flie from their sin (1565), John Barker’s Of the horyble and woful destruccion of Ierusalem and of the synges and tokens that were seene before it was destroyed (1569), and the anonymous ballad Daniels siftyng in these our dayes aptly applyed (1572) all draw heavily on verses from the Book of Daniel. While John Calvin’s commentary on Daniel was translated into English and began circulating in London as early as the 1570s, the 1590s saw a surge in Daniel materials among writers and theologians. Hugh Broughton, the Christian Hebraist, published several texts on Daniel, including An apologie in briefe assertions defending that our Lord died in the time properly foretold to Daniel in 1592 and Daniel, his Chaldie visions and his Ebrew, translated from the original Hebrew, in 1597. In the same year, fellow Protestant theologian and Hebrew scholar Edward Lively published A true chronologie of the times of the Persian monarchie, and after to the destruction of Ierusalem by the Romanes. The active circulation of Daniel’s apocalyptic visions in the last decade of the sixteenth century seems to underscore early modern England’s anxiety over the end of days brought on by the impending turn of the millennium. Despite this cultural obsession with the figure of Daniel, the status of the Book of Daniel as a canonical text is contentious in both Jewish and Christian traditions. In the Hebrew Bible (Tanach), Daniel is included among the Writings (Ketuvim) rather than among the Prophets (Na’viim). The Daniel text also bears the most striking irregularity in its bilingual composition in Hebrew and Aramaic.7 In addition to its linguistic anomalies, Daniel is also unusual in its narrative arrangement as its chapters switch between first- and third-person narration (including one chapter written entirely in Nebuchadnezzer’s voice).8 The Talmud offers an editorial history of Daniel and explains that the prophet composed the text himself; however, it was only committed from oral to written record by the Anshei Knesset HaGadola (Men of the Great Synagogue), a group of 120 sages, including Ezra, who were tasked with fixing the Jewish biblical canon toward the middle of the fifth century (c. 450).9 Although Jesus regards Daniel as a major prophet in Matthew 24:15, the content of his eponymous text is contested in the Christian canon. By the fourth century, the Book of Daniel existed in multiple editions, and the Greek translations

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included three sections that are not contained in the Hebrew version, including the episode of Susanna and the Elders. While the Roman Catholic Church includes these sections in their canon, Protestants follow Jerome’s fourth-century Vulgate and regard these additions as apocryphal sections since there is little doubt that they were added after the Hebrew text had been completed.10 In spite of (or perhaps because of) Daniel’s contested place in both Hebrew and Christian Scriptures, the figure of Daniel became prominent in various art forms. He inspired writers and artists from Chaucer to Rembrandt, and Daniel in the lion’s den became one of the most common penitential images in Christian iconography. Dramatic enactments from the Book of Daniel originated in Ordo Prophetarum and continued into the twelfth-century with Danielis Ludus, first performed by young clerics at Beauvais Cathedral in northern France, and, within the tradition of liturgical drama, scattered performances persisted during the Reformation.11 Protestant commentators zealously point out the theatrical qualities of the biblical narrative.12 In his reading of Thomas Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy as a sixteenth-century adaptation of the Book of Daniel that enacts the fall of Babylon/Spain, Frank Ardolino shows that Protestant commentators had no qualms about reframing the Book of Daniel as a dramatic work. Ardolino supports his allegorical reading with Protestant reformer Brightman’s claim that “reading Daniel is like seeing a play in which ‘the lovelie face of . . . truth . . . [is] brought upon the stage in open view,’ as well as Calvin’s praise of ‘the goodness of God that shyneth forth in the end of the tragedy’.”13 Early modern Protestants even saw Daniel’s sixth-century prophecies playing themselves out in the theatrum mundi of sixteenth-century Europe. In 1520, Martin Luther views the Roman Catholic Church as reprising the role of the first Roman empire, whose downfall Daniel prophesizes. Luther vilifies the corrupted church as the Whore of Babylon and casts himself and his fellow reformers as the young Judean “princes” suffering in exile.14 Two decades later, English biblical translator George Joye, who approaches Scripture as a divine script for the unfolding of human events, employs theatrical metaphors in his exposition of Daniel, claiming that “cryst [sic] is even now preparinge these judgement seatis . . . to destroy these wicked Anticrysten hornes . . . [for this is] the ende of this tragedye . . . thus go they [the wicked] out of their playe even when thei thinke to be but in the middis of their matter.”15 When he incorporated Daniel into The Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare thus followed, wittingly or not, an artistic and interpretive tradition. Yet

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the very features of the Book of Daniel that troubled Talmudic sages, Protestant reformers, and English readers likely appealed to Shakespeare’s dramatic sensibilities. Not only does the life of Daniel lend itself to theatrical representation (of abducted youths, foreign courts, threatened dynasties, and dream-visions, not to mention lions’ dens), but the text also relies primarily on dialogue as a mode of revelation. Since the Jews had been expulsed from England in 1290, Shakespeare was unlikely to fabricate his Jewish protagonist based on personal experiences and engagements, but he could look toward Daniel – a Jew already occupying the world stage and permeating England’s cultural consciousness. The Merchant of Venice does not just engage with Daniel on a topical level; the play stresses the Hebraic context. Significantly, Daniel’s name only appears in the text when Portia refuses to deviate from the strict letter of the law, prompting Shylock to cheer, “A Daniel come to judgment! yea, a Daniel! / O wise young judge, how I do honour thee!” (4.1.231–2). Lewalski and Shapiro both identify this invocation of Daniel as a reference to the judicial expertise he demonstrates while defending Susanna against her licentious voyeurs.16 Although the association with Susanna is entirely possible, it is important to note that while this episode was canonical in England’s recent Catholic past, the beloved tale was moved into the Apocrypha of the Geneva and Bishops’ Bibles available during Elizabeth’s reign. I believe Shakespeare (and his audience) might have found it more probable that the Jew, even a “bad” one like Shylock, would reference the Old Testament over the Apocrypha.17 Thus, instead of focusing on the apocryphal or deuterocanonical reference to the Daniel of the Susanna episode, we might focus on the specifically Hebrew references in Shylock’s invocation. Shakespeare underscores his Hebraic emphasis through his meticulous use of particular Hebraic names. When Portia is disguised as a young doctor from Rome, she calls herself “Balthasar” – the same name Daniel receives upon arrival at the Chaldean court in Daniel 1:7, when an officer “gave unto Daniel [the name] of Belteshazzar.” The Geneva gloss on this verse explains “the Jews gave their children names which might always put them in remembrance of some point of religion.” The Chaldeans’ act of renaming Jewish captives can thus be seen as a politically motivated attempt to distance them from their Hebrew heritage.18 It is also significant that Shylock refers to the first patriarch as “Abram” rather than “Abraham.” As Julia Reinhard Lupton explains, “Abram” was the name used “until the institution of the circumcision (Gen 17:5); the unconverted, precontractual name ‘Abram’ situates him in a moment before covenantal

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transformation, announcing Shylock’s Bible as a text not yet marked by the epochal shift of the New Covenant.”19 And in a play where names are so intimately linked with identity and covenant, Shakespeare’s “Shylock” remains an enigma. As John Gross laments in his study of Shylock, “His first distinguishing mark is his name. It is a name that is not found anywhere else, and scholars have searched assiduously for its possible origin . . . if there was an outside source, it remains a mystery.”20 While Shakespeare’s knowledge of Hebrew remains doubtful, I cannot help but wonder if perhaps the playwright came across the Hebrew term Shylah (‫ )שאלה‬meaning “question.” Indeed, if ever a Shakespearean character was given a name which captures its very rhetorical essence it is “Shyl(ock).”

Performing Exegesis The direct association of Portia with Daniel invites characters in the play, as well as Shakespeare’s audience, to think through questions of exegetical approaches to Scripture, and how these are manifest on the stage. We might begin by wondering what exactly Portia does at this particular moment in the play that calls this Hebraic figure to Shylock’s (or Shakespeare’s) mind? In the Jewish tradition, commentators praised Daniel for his ability to resist the pressures of assimilation, even when he earns recognition from the Babylonian and Persian sovereigns. While the Tanach provides several instances of Israelites living in idolatrous, hostile environments, Daniel, unlike Joseph and Moses, is not a clandestine Jew; rather, he wears his Jewishness on his gabardine sleeve. The story of Daniel begins with King Nebuchadnezzar forcefully seizing young, educated Judeans to serve as assets in his court. These young men helped an exiled group of Jews develop into a community that would eventually return to Jerusalem and rebuild the temple. Daniel was the leader of that generation, an inspiration to his peers, and the deliverer of God’s message to the heathen kings of Babylon. Despite being thrown in furnaces and lions’ dens, Daniel and his companions, in the rabbinic tradition, are proof that if Israel remains loyal to God, He remains their protector. Such an interpretation of Daniel motivates Shylock’s premature celebration of victory over his oppressors: Shylock reads Portia’s refusal of Bassanio’s plea to “wrest once the law to your authority: to do a great right, do a little wrong” as analogous to Daniel’s refusal to forsake Mosaic Law while living in the extreme circumstances of captivity. Shylock voices this appraisal of Portia when he joyously proclaims, “A second Daniel come to judgment! Yea, a Daniel. / O wise young judge” (4.1.231–2).21 This first

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reference to Daniel in the play sets up the growing conflict between religious and political authority, as well as the readiness of individuals to marshal sacred texts for personal benefit. Fittingly, it is Daniel’s ability to interpret sacred writing that initiates his foray into political life and ensuing social advancement. From a hermeneutic perspective, Daniel has a reputation for being able to read the handwriting on the wall, literally. In chapter 5, the fingers of a human hand appear and write on the wall of King Balthazar’s palace: “‫ ְּתֵקל ּוַפְרִסין‬,‫( ”ְמֵנא ְמֵנא‬menay menay tekel upharsin). Daniel translates this message as follows: “Menay: God has counted the years of your kingship and terminated it. Tekel: You have been weighed in the scales and found wanting. Peres: Your kingdom has been broken up and given to Media and Persia” (Daniel 5:25–8). Shylock identifies Portia as a figural Daniel at this moment in the play because of her apparent objective clarity and insight that is analogous to the traits Daniel displays as a young scholar in a foreign court. She alone is capable of reading every “jot” of the handwriting on the wall: indeed, Antonio’s debt has been counted and his bond is forfeit (4.1.306).22 Antonio’s “kingdom,” or wealth, has been broken up as his ships have all met with disaster, and now his flesh must be weighed because his contract has been found wanting. Shylock is the first character in the play to pronounce the name of Daniel, and this invocation is aligned with the same allegorical approach he has privileged throughout. The Jew sees himself as a figural Abraham in the loss of his beloved only child, Jessica, and he compares himself to Jacob, a principally pious man and much-abused philanthropist. Shakespeare equips Shylock with the most basic approach to exegesis (considered typical of the Bible’s earliest Jewish responders) in allowing him to pronounce the allegorical relationships between Scripture and lived experience. Yet, Shylock’s reception of Daniel does not stand for long as there is a competing interpretation that must be taken into account. Daniel is also considered a prominent figure in Christian eschatology, and his prophecies and calculations of the end of days earned him the highest praises from the voices of Protestant reformers. Jerome writes in the prologue to his commentary on Daniel, “none of the prophets has so clearly spoken concerning Christ as has this prophet Daniel. For not only did he assert that He would come, a prediction common to the other prophets as well, but also he set forth the very time at which He would come . . . so striking was the reliability of what the prophet foretold.”23 The Argument to Daniel in the Geneva Bible extols “Daniel above all others [who] had most special revelations of such things as would come to the Church, even from the

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time that they were in captivity, to the last end of the world, and to the general resurrection.” Moments after Shylock equates Portia’s judicial expertise with that of the Hebrew prophet, Shakespeare dislodges Shylock’s reading practice with a subsequent pronouncement of the name “Daniel” by another courtroom interloper. When Portia discloses her ruling that the Jew may have his bond, but draw no blood, Gratiano mockingly echoes Shylock’s earlier praise and emphatically shouts: “A second Daniel, a Daniel!” (4.1.350). Gratiano’s gloss announces the presence of a revisionist Christian exegetical approach to Daniel – or Hebraic Scripture as a whole – coming to correct earlier Jewish readings. Several scholars have argued that Shakespeare dramatizes the supersession here, in which the Jew’s Torah becomes “Old” Testament, and the “New” Testament is the Venetian law, rightfully left in the hands of the Christians. For Rosemary Ruether, anti-Semitism has its very roots in the development of a hermeneutical method that legitimizes Christian faith by appropriating Jewish Scripture, while simultaneously demonizing its original interlocutors.24 Although Shylock identifies the shared virtues between Daniel and Portia, he also exposes his own conditional relationship with the Bible: while familiar with its narratives, Shylock does not follow its teachings or emulate its exemplars. The Jew initially refuses to dine with his Christian hosts, as Daniel did when living among Gentiles, though Shylock quickly accedes and goes to dinner at Antonio’s home, showing that he lacks the conviction of his prophetic ancestor. Yet Shakespeare complicates the account of the scene as a usurpation of exegetical authority from Jew to Christian by having the words that proclaim Portia a “second Daniel” issue forth from the mouth of Gratiano – the play’s gratuitous fool, or Shakespeare’s Christian “schlemiel.” In the play’s first scene, Gratiano asks Antonio to “let me play the fool” (1.1.84), and throughout the play, no one takes him seriously. Bassanio even warns Antonio, saying “Gratiano speaks an infinite deal of nothing, more / than any man in all Venice” (1.1.84–5). Given the characterization of Gratiano perpetuated since the beginning of the play, is the audience meant to take this man as a trustworthy Bible reader? Moreover, is Scripture simply to be wrested to the shifting demands of human desire for the sake of rendering one’s opinion authoritative or “valid”? As a dramatist, Shakespeare is attentive to how a person simultaneously plays various roles, and his double-casting of Daniel as Jew and Christian belies a mistrust of both enforced religious identity and exclusionary hermeneutical approaches. Rather, Shakespeare allows Shylock and

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Gratiano, secular Jew and secular Gentile, to offer their own typological readings of the events that unfold in the Venetian courtroom in order to probe the struggle for hermeneutical authority through the mechanism of performance. When a writer crafts a play or a scene based on biblical narratives, he or she makes certain interpretive decisions about how to develop the plot, characters, and dialogue in relation to the source material; in doing so, the writer functions as both playwright and exegete, often drawing from personal knowledge of Scripture, contemporary commentaries, and homiletic discourse, to create what I call a performative exegesis – an explication of biblical narrative through theatrical enactment. For instance, George Peele’s The Love of David and Fair Bathshebe (1594) and the anonymous Interlude of Godly Queene Hester (1561) rely on the Bible for their main plot, but their content is not derived from Scripture alone. These plays may be seen as performative – or enacted – exegesis in which scriptural interpretations and inquiries (by theologians such as Calvin and Hugh Broughton, as well as Rashi and Maimonides) are represented through the biblical tropes and dialogue that give dimension to these works. Through their respective dramatic texts, Peele and the Hester playwright serve as commentators by offering calculated readings of their source material for their respective audiences. And since formal classifications of disciplines (such as theology and aesthetics) and spheres of life (such as religious and social) had yet to gain distinction, plays that staged biblical subject matter offered their content up to new exigencies for the collective audience to interpret the scene before them. In Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, Daniel is neither a character in the play nor does his biblical story furnish its plot, but invocations of his biblical personality by other characters enrich the drama and illuminate its thematic concerns. While Shylock is the first to draw the biblical parallels between Daniel’s life and Portia’s actions, the Jew is aware he is not critiquing a biblical passage, but a judicial performance. Portia’s youthful mannerism, rhetorical technique, and overall delivery serve as the basis for Shylock’s appraisal of her as a “second Daniel.” The most compelling aspect of this exchange between Shylock and Gratiano is that it offers us the chance to look at drama as performative exegesis and exegesis as theatrical activity. Although Antonio’s life is spared, it is done so in the “estimation of a hair” (4.1.345), visually demonstrating to the audience the potentially devastating and all-pervasive consequences of misinterpreting and misappropriating texts, whether secular or sacred. After all, the status of Shylock’s bond not only jeopardizes Antonio’s life, but also Bassanio and

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Portia’s marriage, as well as the power of the Venetian legal system and the health of its commerce since “the trade and profit of the city consisteth of all nations” (3.3.33–4). While the play labors to challenge paradigms of interpretive authority by endorsing an “unschooled, unpracticed” (3.2.163) female exegete in the figure of Portia, the scene still ends with exegetical integrity in conflict with the apparatus of the state. Portia’s hermeneutic proficiency is no longer necessary once it is used to achieve the interpretation that was sought after to save Antonio’s life. The play slips back into prejudiced reading practices when Antonio petitions the court for a “favour” that the Jew “presently become a Christian,” despite the fact that there is no legal necessity (4.1.403–4). Earlier in the play, Antonio warns Bassanio that “the devil can cite Scripture for his purpose,” suggesting that Shylock’s hermeneutical approach is duplicitous and self-serving (1.3.107). And yet, the Christian triumph in the courtroom scene still provides for a capricious and abusive legal system that pronounces rulings that do not follow from the text. Both Shylock and Gratiano read Portia as a prophetic Daniel, and they do so from the standpoint of their own positions. Through these dueling exegetes, Shakespeare shows how the hermeneutic process exposes more about the interpreter’s own biases, values, and cultural attitudes than the “text” he interprets. Offering one final blow to Shylock in the courtroom, Gratiano reiterates his claim: “A Daniel, still say I, a second Daniel! / I thank thee, Jew, for teaching me that word” (4.1.354–5). While Gratiano’s scornful jest aims to humiliate the Jew by echoing Shylock’s earlier praise of Portia, like most jokes it springs from an underlying truth and acute self-awareness. As his name suggests, Gratiano does owe the Jew gratitude for “teaching” him the word “Daniel” through the provision of the Old Testament. Here Shakespeare employs irony so that his audience can register Gratiano’s joke on two levels: first, the Jew certainly does not anticipate his own words to be used against him; and second, what could be more unexpected for the audience than Gratiano admitting ignorance? Gratiano’s apparent delight in humiliating the Jew through imitation evokes Aristotle’s claim that “to imitate is, even from childhood, part of man’s nature,”25 and is the primary mode through which man acquires knowledge, which is itself the most fundamental human pleasure. By observing the Jew’s reaction to Portia, Gratiano not only learns a word he has presumably never heard before, but he also acquires a hermeneutic for how to apply the term “Daniel.” For Shylock, the moniker “Daniel” fits someone who remains committed to his principles while operating in an antagonistic environment. Like Christian

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commentators of the Reformation, Gratiano uses the term “Daniel” to characterize someone who identifies God’s elect and demonstrates how He cares for His Church. Shakespeare impresses upon his audience that “the meaning of Scripture is only evident or intelligible by an act of interpretation,”26 with performance emerging as a viable exegetical mode and pedagogical apparatus. Thus, a seemingly minor exchange hits an early modern nerve: Christianity’s sense of indebtedness to Judaic Scripture and its exegetical traditions.

Hermeneutic Indebtedness and the Paradox of Gratitude The theme of indebtedness pulses throughout the Book of Daniel, which begins with King Nebuchadnezzar enriching his own court by carting off the most promising young minds from Jerusalem to Babylon. The narrative of Daniel repeatedly demonstrates the Gentiles’ appreciation of Israel’s wisdom, and, by extension, the gratitude the Jew must show toward his creator for that endowment. (The very term Jew, yehudi, is derived from the Hebrew word hodu, meaning to praise, glorify, and extol.) Shortly after Daniel’s arrival, the youth is summoned to recall and interpret a dream the king has forgotten. When Nebuchadnezzar is satisfied with the interpretation offered, Daniel credits his dream-interpreting abilities to God, proclaiming, “I thank thee and praise thee, O thou God of my fathers, that thou hast given me wisdom and strength” (Daniel 2:23; my italics). Nevertheless, the monarch insists on demonstrating his gratitude to Daniel, much like Antonio and Gratiano insist on “paying” Portia for her revelatory wisdom. While Daniel disdains the conventional expression of appreciation – bestowing titles and gifts – he succeeds in making the king pay his “debt” in the form of currency that Daniel insists upon: encomium to God. Thus, Nebuchadnezzar, a pagan ruler who is revered by his people as an all-powerful “king of kings” (Daniel 2:37), finds himself in the paradoxical position of acknowledging the Hebrew God’s power as superior to his own. Daniel constantly extols God for gracing him with wisdom in liturgical formulations reminiscent of David’s Psalms, which, as Hannibal Hamlin has shown, were “alluded to in the sacred texts of the liturgy and in the secular plays of the theater alike.”27 Shakespeare’s appropriation of Scripture has been widely demonstrated, though here I add to the corpus Gratiano’s “I thank thee” as a reverberation of Daniel’s “I thank thee.” Yet Shakespeare’s schematization of the gratitude expressed in Daniel extends

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beyond Gratiano’s sarcastic remark. In the preface to his commentary on Daniel, Calvin reminds his readers: The authority, too, which [Daniel] obtained, and which inspired the Jews with perfect confidence in his teaching, extends to us also. Shameful, indeed, and base would be our ingratitude, if we did not embrace him as God’s Prophet, whom the Chaldeans were compelled to honor – a people whom we know to have been superstitious and full of pride.28

Calvin proceeds to liken the predicament of the Jews in the diaspora with the current state of the Protestants: fragile and flanked by enemies on all sides. His rhetorical pattern of identification and division – empathizing with the plight of the Jew while espousing claims of moral superiority – is largely representative of Christian exegetical practice of the period. This is an appropriate lens through which to view The Merchant of Venice since Shakespeare employs this pattern throughout, giving the play its uniquely ambiguous and unstable texture. The act of expressing gratitude – showing thanks for the provision of a good or service rendered by another – simultaneously implies the awareness of a deficiency or limitation. Despite his obvious dislike of Shylock, Antonio’s insufficient funds propel him toward the Jew, and while Bassanio has no qualms about Antonio financially obligating himself to the Jew, he expresses misgivings when the nature of the debt shifts: antonio bassanio

Content, i’ faith: I’ll seal to such a bond And say there is much kindness in the Jew. You shall not seal to such a bond for me: I’ll rather dwell in my necessity.

(1.3.164–7)

While Antonio is prepared to accept Shylock’s favor of offering a fleshbond, Bassanio refuses to accept the Jew’s apparent “kindness” and prefers to “dwell in [his own] necessity” rather than accumulate a psychological or moral debt to the Jew, which he would have no way of repaying. Bassanio’s resistance to accept the Jew’s “gratis” bond gestures toward the underbelly of gratitude: the recipient’s acknowledgment of the benefactor’s momentary superiority, whether financial, intellectual, spiritual, or emotional. In Thomas Aquinas’s tract “Of Thankfulness or Gratitude,” he links gratitude and justice and argues that the virtue of gratitude helps to maintain equality and order human actions in an upright manner.29 When a judge renders a just verdict, in principle, there is no one to thank as he or she has simply noted the facts and applied the law correctly. However, when the judge exercises mercy rather than justice, and does not

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demand all that the law might require, thankfulness is in order. Aquinas goes on to draw a distinction between fiscal debt and moral debt, as “the repayment that belongs to the virtue of thankfulness or gratitude answers to the moral debt, and is paid spontaneously. Hence, thanksgiving is less thankful when compelled.”30 In Christian theology, grace – the gratis bestowal of divine favor on undeserving humanity – is considered the ultimate attribute of God, and by grace alone (sola gratia) men are saved. The aim of salvation thus presents the practitioner with a paradox since grace is dearly desired but cannot be earned,31 leaving mankind in a perpetual state of indebtedness toward their Savior that no amount of good works, prayer, or self-sacrifice can ever repay.32 Moral debt, as opposed to financial debt, is inherently difficult to settle because it can only be paid “spontaneously.” If gratitude is only identified by outward markings such as gestures and the expression of verbal phrases, how does one know when the performance of gratitude is genuine? Moreover, how can we ever be sure we have sufficiently settled our moral debts? Shakespeare’s rhetorical artfulness with the terms of indebtedness belies the play’s more profound attention to the theological and humanistic, rather than fiscal, nature of the obligation between the Christian and Jew. As Luther acknowledges in his early years (and Adelman takes up as her entry point into the play), “we are but Gentiles, while the Jews are of the lineage of Christ. We are aliens and in-laws; they are blood relatives, cousins, and brothers of the Lord.”33 Shylock makes it quite clear that his bond with Antonio is not a routine commercial transaction, but, rather, an act of charity, advertising to Antonio “this kindness will I show” (1.3.155), just a few lines before he invokes “Abram” (1.3.172), the patriarch renowned for his hospitality toward anyone in need who passed his tent that was open to travelers in all four directions. With Shakespeare’s substitution of financial capital with flesh and blood, the play is not subtle in its consideration of various forms of obligation, such as intellectual, ethical, and emotional debt. As the play becomes increasingly focused on discharging the Christian’s obligation to the Jew, and the means by which Antonio might once and for all free himself of this cumbersome bond, Gratiano’s thanks exposes the play’s realization that even in apparent absolution, the Christian remains perpetually in the Jew’s intellectual and doctrinal debt. Gratiano’s sarcastic “I thank thee, Jew” and appropriation of the term “Daniel” reveals the paradox of gratitude Shakespeare uses to power his play: ever-present in the admission of thanks is a confession of inadequacy and dependence. The theme of indebtedness pulses through the Book of Daniel, which begins with the recruitment of young Jewish scholars to

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enrich Nebuchadnezzar’s court during the Babylonian exile. In Shakespeare’s play and in Daniel, as in Protestant England at large, although the Jew himself is reviled, his Scripture and its teachings are still valuable and worthy of praise since they explore universal concerns such as moral practice, civic obedience, religious reverence, and even textual interpretation. Moreover, the most fundamental Christian interpretive mode – typology – may be viewed as a paradoxical hermeneutic in its attempt to simultaneously legitimate the New Testament and its Christology as it disinherits the traditionally Jewish practices established in the Old Testament. How can two seemingly contradictory truths – the intrinsic value of the Jewish Scripture, and the essential degeneracy of its possessors – stand side by side? Shakespeare probes the entanglements and debts between Jew and Christian by having Portia engage in a traditionally Jewish exegetical mode by employing the law, not mercy, to save Antonio. As Harold Bloom argues, Portia’s literalization of the Jewish law saves the Christian.34 Aryeh Botwinick demonstrates through skillful close reading of Talmudic material that Portia’s ability to decipher the bond/text conforms with extensive knowledge of old and new legal and theological traditions: Through her speeches in defense of Antonio, [Portia] helps to fashion within the confines of the play a new Christian reality (ransacked at least in part – and modeled after – Jewish sources) . . . With Portia’s argument against a strictly literalistic construal of Antonio’s pound of flesh, Shakespeare imaginatively and dramatically recaptures and reattaches what Christianity had forfeited by renouncing the centrality of law in Judaism . . . In her reenactment of [the priority assigned to legal mechanisms and modes of argument], Portia equips Christianity with a comparable flexibility and adaptability – a parallel expansion of legal resources to enable periodic and ongoing readjustments between means and ends to take place.35

Portia saves Antonio by reinvigorating Christianity with an attentiveness to the law it abandoned long ago. In her act of Judaizing Christianity, Portia proves to have more in common with the figure of Daniel than just the adopted name of “Balthasar.” Sixteenth-century Puritan exegete Hugh Broughton recognizes the unique hermeneutical mode of Daniel, arguing that “we may see how Daniel ioyneth both Testaments, ending the Ceremonies, and breaking the partition wall of the old: and laying the foundation and groundworke of the New.”36 In this sense, Portia acts as a liberalizing force in the play and lives up to her reputation as a “second

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Daniel” indeed. Her ability to pronounce godly justice appears inspired, just as “God gave [Daniel] knowledge, and understanding in all learning and wisdom: also he gave Daniel understanding of all visions and dreams” (Daniel 1:17). We return to Aquinas’s point: when a judge renders a just verdict, in principle, there is no one to thank as he has simply noted the facts and applied the law correctly. However, when the judge exercises mercy rather than justice, and does not demand all that the law might require, thankfulness is in order. Due to Portia’s hermeneutic dexterity, even in his redemption, Antonio remains indebted to the Jews by virtue of their exegetical practices and traditions that Portia adopts. Gratiano’s derisive “thank you” to the Jew disrupts Antonio’s salvation, and even Shakespeare cannot produce a completely satisfactory settlement. The choice to leave Shylock’s conversion offstage further problematizes the play’s supposed transfer of authority over text from Jew to Christian by highlighting the connections between interpretation, authority, and identity. Additionally, it raises questions about what compels an individual to obey particular interpretations of texts, whether human or divine. After Portia first announces the Jew’s bond is legally valid and Antonio “stand[s] within his danger,” she urges Shylock to submit to extratextual interpretations and pleads, “Then must the Jew be merciful” (4.1.183, 187). Shylock quickly responds: “On what compulsion must I?” (4.1.187–8). Without actually witnessing the event, the audience is barred from making authoritative pronouncements about Shylock as a faithful subject at the end of the play. The ambiguous space between the outward performance of religion and one’s inward faith resonated with Shakespeare’s early modern English audience, for whom it was not a crime to be Catholic, although the ritualistic means by which to perform such faith were illegal. Indeed, this is the very predicament that enables King Darius’s jealous courtiers to catch Daniel “on the hip.” When it becomes illegal to pray to any deity other than the king for thirty days, Daniel refuses to conceal his faith (despite the advice of his Jewish companions to pray in secret), and effectively thrusts himself into the lions’ den like one of Foxe’s martyrs. Although Shylock’s court mandated conversion holds the promise of social repair, the audience is denied ocular proof and left to speculate whether or not the Jew goes through with the christening, though such proof is often provided in modern performances, such as Al Pacino’s Shylock in Central Park, New York, in 2010. Daniel’s conversion from Jewish prophet to proto-Christian member of the church is likewise accomplished not within the narrative itself, but through his exegetical reception, underscoring the power interpretation holds over identity

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formation. By leaving the progression from interpretation to application in a state of perpetual uncertainty, we are left to ask ourselves: what compels an individual to obey particular interpretations of texts, whether sacred or secular? How does the interpretive act compel us to comply with its process? In the context of the Protestant Reformation, Shakespeare imagines dislodging interpretive processes from their scriptural applications for more general social and political purposes, and questions whether the debt of secular legal and critical practice to biblical exegesis can ever be paid in full. By having Gratiano interpret Portia’s performance just as Shylock does, from the standpoint of his own experience, Shakespeare demonstrates a reading methodology that is more human than uniquely Jewish. As such, the play opens itself to questions concerning the constitutive, epistemic, and critical affordances and risks attached to all forms of human interpretation. The Merchant of Venice continues to offer productive ways for us to think about what is gained in the process of debt through its enactment of exegetical activity and interpretive authority, instances at once burdened and endowed with unexpected baggage from other moments in the tradition. Through this play, Shakespeare challenges us to re-evaluate accepted hermeneutic practice and the basis of interpretive authority in light of the indissoluble bonds that exist between and among Jews and Christians. And for that, we owe him thanks.

chapter 11

Maimed Rites and Whirling Words in Hamlet Jesse M. Lander

Doubt wisely; in strange way To stand inquiring right, is not to stray; To sleep, or run wrong, is.

– John Donne, “Satire III”1

Hamlet is Shakespeare’s most emphatically post-Reformation tragedy. It is the play that most clearly reveals the form and pressure of a historical moment that Peter Lake describes as “strewn with the wreckage of partially disrupted belief systems, sets of assumptions about how the world worked and where the holy was to be found and how it might be approached, invoked, and manipulated.”2 This sense of disorientation was sometimes clearly articulated in contemporary literature, such as the anonymous “Lament for Our Lady’s Shrine at Walsingham”: Such are the wrackes as now do shewe of that holy land, Levell Levell with the ground the towres doe lye Which with their golden glitteringe tops Pearsed once to the skye Where weare gates no gates ar nowe, the waies unknowen.3

The “waies” that are now unknown comprise an entire form of life, a highly integrated set of ritual practices that provided a deep sense of the world’s structure, and though Max Weber’s stock has fallen, it is hard not to read this description of wrecked religion as a powerful expression of disenchantment.4 Hamlet, famously, also portrays ruin: Denmark is an “unweeded garden” where “The time is out of joint,”5 and decay, decrepitude, and debility are found at every turn. If the “Lament” describes Walsingham Abbey’s towers as “Levell Levell with the ground,” Hamlet similarly wishes 188

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that his “too too sullied flesh would melt, / Thaw and resolve itself into a dew” (1.2.129–30). But Hamlet does not merely register the changes associated with the Reformation; instead, the play courts controversy by taking up a range of contested issues: providence and predestination, free will, the Eucharist, purgatory, ghosts, prayer, burial rites, and the resurrection of the body.6 Hamlet actively, and anxiously, questions this “wreckage of partially disrupted belief systems.” If reformers (and later triumphalist Protestant historians) presented the dismantling of the ancient liturgical order as a liberation, their newfound freedom came with an imperative to distinguish the sacred from the profane, to seek for signs of the holy in the dross of everyday life. What Charles Taylor has termed “the affirmation of ordinary life”7 was thus not an entirely straightforward development, since it was often accompanied by a searching anxiety. In an influential reading, Stephen Greenblatt has called attention to “a sense of shattered ritual” found in Hamlet.8 According to Greenblatt, “the disruption or poisoning of virtually all rituals for managing grief, allaying personal and collective anxiety, and restoring order” is an “overarching phenomenon in Hamlet.”9 The consequence is a profound anxiety; indeed, for Greenblatt, “corrosive inwardness” is “the hallmark of the entire play.”10 Without disagreeing entirely, it is important to note that Greenblatt’s version of the story – a nostalgic one that feels painfully the loss of a time when there was a community of the living and the dead, and where “corrosive inwardness” is the consequence and the cost of this community’s collapse, thus reversing the polarities of value typically associated with a secularization narrative in which authentic individual autonomy must break through the hard carapace of ritual and tradition11 – has perhaps delimited our view of the play’s engagement with religion. Greenblatt effectively reduces religion to ritual, so that the absence of ritual corresponds to a loss of religion and any recourse to the transcendent. This is to overlook the profound role of the Bible in the play. If compromised ritual displays post-Reformation wreckage,12 the presence of biblical text – especially the providentialism of Matthew 10:29: “Are not two sparrowes solde for a farthing, and one of them shal not fall on the ground without your father?”13 – serves a compensatory role. Whereas the reliable signposts of the medieval sacramental system were attenuated by the Reformation, the new centrality of the vernacular Bible provided godly Christians with a powerful account of, to quote Lake again, “how the world worked and where the holy was to be found and how it might be approached, invoked, and manipulated.” In their dedication to Queen Elizabeth, the Geneva translators explain:

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jesse m. lander The word of God is an evident token of Gods love and our assurance of his defence, wheresoever it is obediently recyved: it is the trial of the spirits: and as the Prophet saieth, It is as a fyre and hammer to breake the stonie heartes of them that resist Gods mercies offred by the preaching of the same. Yea it is sharper than any two edged sworde to examine the very thoghtes and to judge the affections of the heart, and to discover whatsoever lieth hid under hypocrisie and would be secret from the face of God and his Churche. So that this must be the first fundacion and groundworke, according whereunto the good stones of this building must be framed, and evil tried out and rejected.14

In some recent scholarship this claim for the centrality of Scripture has been treated as problematic. For Christopher Haigh, Protestantism’s “stress upon Bible-reading . . . limited its popular appeal.”15 Indeed, Haigh often appears to accuse Protestants of an unconscionable elitism, the promotion of a self-congratulatory and overly-intellectual theology that could not but frustrate and antagonize the common people. For James Simpson, reformed scripturalism leads not to citizen-saints who read and debate, but to illiberal fundamentalism.16 While these arguments might provide a justified corrective to an overly rosy view of Protestant scripturalism and its relationship with individualistic modern liberalism, we should not deny the novelty and consequence of the Protestant program of Bible reading. The transformative ideal associated with a practice of embodied reading is captured in the first of the state-sanctioned homilies. “A Fruitfull Exhortation to the Readyng and Knowledge of Holy Scripture” declares the sufficiency of Scripture: These bokes, therefore, ought to be much in our handes, in our eyes, in our eares, in oure mouthes, but most of all in our hartes. For the Scripture of God is the heavenly meate of our soules; the hearing and kepyng of it maketh us blessed, sanctifieth us and maketh us holy. It converteth our soules; it is a light lanterne to our fete; it is a sure, a constant and perpetuall instrument of salvacion.17

In an age of limited literacy, such exhortations might appear to demand an unattainable ideal. But despite the hyperbole of some zealous ministers, literacy itself was not considered a salvific requirement, and the Elizabethan Church offered access to God’s Word through sermons, homilies, and in the recited lectionary of the Book of Common Prayer. The opposition between the ritualism of medieval Catholicism and the Bible-based piety of Protestantism is a familiar trope that originates in post-Reformation controversy and is perpetuated in modern sociology; the conceptual clarity afforded by this dichotomy, while illuminating,

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misleads.18 Scripture did not displace ritual; what changed was the new stress placed on Scripture as the basis and authority for ritual. Thomas Cooper, Bishop of Winchester and no radical, puts it thus: Though the heads and gouernors of the church, with the assistance of the greater number, doe forsake the true worde, & worshipping of God . . . do bring newe Rites & ceremonies into the church, and vtterly corrupt and deface the righte Sacramentes, and true markes of the Churche: yet GOD reserueth to himselfe his true churche, sending from tyme to tyme, Doctours, and Teachers . . . although the same bee not allowed by them, that will bee counted the Ordinary governoures of the churche, but esteeme them as Scismatiks, as Heretiques, as disturbers of the people of God.19

The “true worde” of God contains what is necessary for the true “worshipping of God”; it is, to repeat the claim of the Geneva translators, “the first fundacion and groundworke, according whereunto the good stones of this building must be framed.” The “maimed rites” of Hamlet thus need to be considered more fully in the context of a biblical culture. This is not to assert as unproblematic the presence of the “groundworke” of the Bible. Indeed, Hamlet displays a persistent concern with the interpretive difficulties raised by “wild and whirling words” (1.5.139). Nor does attending to the biblical context suggest a confessional reading of the play in which a biblically based Protestantism overcomes a residual, ritually focused Catholicism. Both the maimed rites and the whirling words are vexed and disorienting, and it is as misleading to suggest that Catholics owned ritual as it is to assert that Protestants had a monopoly on the Bible. But if we trace out the relationship of the particular rites of death, and Hamlet’s invocation of Matthew 10:29, we note not only ways in which rites and Bible inform each other through the play, but also the subtle way that the biblical text’s providentialism compensates for the play’s truncated or inadequate rituals.

The Maimed Rites of Death The play’s concerns with rite and ritual are, indeed, explicit. In his opening speech, Claudius introduces the theme of ritual confusion when describing his marriage to Gertrude: “With mirth in funeral and with dirge in marriage” (1.2.12). The stately cadences of Claudius’s language and his carefully balanced antitheses cannot resolve the fundamental indecorum of a mirthful funeral and a mournful marriage. This derangement pains Hamlet. When Horatio explains, “I came to see your father’s funeral,” Hamlet responds: “I think it was to see my mother’s wedding” (1.2.176,

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177–8). Restating the claim for an indecorous proximity, the language of observation makes it clear that the rituals of marriage and funeral operate as public occasions in which visibility is a central aspect of the event. However, this scene also critiques the degree to which ritual behavior involves a scripted public performance, a display designed to manifest a truth at once abstract and invisible. When Claudius and Gertrude chide Hamlet for his ostentatious grief, a debate about what constitutes appropriate mourning provokes Hamlet’s famous assertion, “I know not ‘seems’.” His “inky cloak” and “customary suits of solemn black” along with “all forms, moods, shapes of grief” cannot truly denote him (1.2.77, 78, 82). He claims to have “that within which passes show” (1.2.85). Here, Hamlet seemingly repudiates the very rituals that he defended to Claudius and Gertrude. They have conspicuously failed in their duty to do “obsequious sorrow” (1.2.92), and yet even a properly choreographed funeral followed by a decorous period of mourning would fail to satisfy the prince. Funeral rites are once again an issue when Laertes returns from Paris enraged by the news of Polonius’s death. Indeed, Laertes seems almost more concerned with the manner of his father’s burial than the cause of his death: His means of death, his obscure funeral – No trophy, sword, nor hatchment o’er his bones, No noble rite, nor formal ostentation – Cry to be heard, as ’twere from heaven to earth, That I must call’t in question.

(4.5.210–14)

What most disturbs Laertes about this “obscure funeral” is its failure to acknowledge social hierarchy and lineage. The trophy, sword, and hatchment or coat of arms are chivalric trappings, material signs of aristocratic status that featured largely in noble funerals such as that of Sir Philip Sidney, which involved 700 processing mourners and was memorialized in a book containing thirty copperplate engravings.20 The “noble rite” that should have been is more assuredly a sign of nobility than a specifically religious ritual. Certainly, “formal ostentation” insists on the importance of spectacle and display, and the anxieties that attend are more obviously social than soteriological. Laertes’s concern with “formal ostentation” is given its fullest expression in the graveyard scene. At Ophelia’s graveside, Laertes twice demands, “What ceremony else?” The officiating minister replies: Her obsequies have been as far enlarg’d As we have warranty. Her death was doubtful; And but that great command o’ersways the order,

Maimed Rites and Whirling Words in Hamlet She should in ground unsanctified been lodg’d Till the last trumpet: for charitable prayers Shards, flints, and pebbles should be thrown on her. Yet here she is allow’d her virgin crants, Her maiden strewments, and the bringing home Of bell and burial.

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Critics have argued over the way that an Elizabethan audience would have responded to this confrontation. Roland Mushat Frye claims that audiences would have sympathized with Laertes,21 but Michael MacDonald is less sure: “In the argument between the priest and the bereaved brother, both parties were justified, and both parties would have claimed a share of the audience’s sympathy.”22 Regardless of who is right, the scene clearly stages a contest over burial ritual. The priest is convinced that no more must be done: “We should profane the service of the dead / To sing sage requiem and such rest to her / As to peace-parted souls” (5.1.229–31). The language here reveals a desire to maintain the sanctity of the ritual, a ritual encroached upon by the unnamed “great command” that “o’ersways the order.” The priest clearly resents the interference of temporal authority and worries that any further concessions would amount to sacrilege. Laertes, for his part, does not appear to worry that Ophelia’s deficient burial will have any influence on her final rest: “I tell thee, churlish priest, / A minist’ring angel shall my sister be / When thou liest howling” (5.1.233–5). While both Laertes and the priest are, for different reasons, unhappy with the form of Ophelia’s burial, Hamlet finds the abbreviated ritual instantly legible. When the funeral procession first appears, he recognizes that the corpse is being afforded “maimed rites”; moreover, he confidently declares, “This doth betoken / The corse they follow did with desp’rate hand / Fordo it own life. ’Twas of some estate” (5.1.212–14). Hamlet easily reads the ritual as an indicator of social, psychological, and arguably soteriological status. Not only is this a person of high standing, it is someone driven by desperation to suicide. Despite Hamlet’s initial confidence, the audience, having heard the gravediggers declare that the coroner has found for Christian burial, might not concede Ophelia’s guilt and consequent damnation. Certainly, as the priest insists, “her death was doubtful,” but its doubtful nature calls into question the symbolic meaning that the ritual should offer. Indeed, the play seems here to cut against notions of ritual as symbol, as a form of practice in which a community represents to itself deeply held meanings. Here, ritual appears to be more akin to a (conflictual) negotiation.23

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Ritual is connected with sacrament, and, as many scholars have discussed, Hamlet suggestively alludes to the Eucharist.24 There is, however, a moment in the play in which sacraments are directly invoked. The apparition complains at having been taken unprepared: “Cut off even in the blossoms of my sin, / Unhousel’d, disappointed, unanel’d, / No reck’ning made, but sent to my account / With all my imperfections on my head” (1.5.76–9). Not having received the “housel” or Eucharist, nor final unction (“unanel’d”), the apparition has been “disappointed,” without the preparation provided by “such rites (e.g., confession and absolution) as are not specified by the other two words.”25 This catalog of ritual practices refers to the last rites and sacraments of the Catholic Church and is often cited along with the play’s purgatorial language to make the argument that the ghost is confessionally Catholic. The apparition clearly believes this situation is intolerable. Its cry – “O horrible! O horrible! Most horrible!” (1.5.80) – may refer to betrayal “by a brother’s hand” (1.5.74), but the more immediate antecedent is a death without ritual preparation. These rites are not so much maimed as missed, and yet the apparition’s profound and painful sense of their efficacy, an efficacy that makes their absence all the more consequential, is not the final word. The “sense of shattered ritual” in Hamlet is palpable, but it is less clear that the play’s depiction of broken ritual manifests a desire to return to an earlier moment when stable ritual practice secured a reassuring sense of community. Consider the exchange between the priest and Laertes: the “great command” that “o’ersways the order” is secular sovereignty, and the priest understandably finds this interference deplorable. And yet Laertes’s attack on the priest provokes sympathy: he speaks with the intense loyalty of a sibling against the arid officiousness of a cleric determined to maintain institutional prerogatives. The upshot is not, however, a wholesale rejection of ritual. After all, Laertes begins with a plea for more ritual: “What ceremony else?” The question might well be posed to the Elizabethan church itself, and, indeed, the many controversies over church order that roiled the so-called Elizabethan Settlement turned on this very issue.

Whirling Words and the Fall of a Sparrow Controversies over ritual and sacrament were enmeshed not only in particular biblical interpretations (most famously in the case of the Eucharist), but in debates over the degree to which sacraments and ecclesiastical rituals

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needed to be grounded in biblical dictates. The Protestant emphasis on the sufficiency of Scripture was met with a Catholic insistence on the teaching authority of the church as its guardian and guarantor. As Thomas More explains, “The word of God is part written in the Scripture, and part unwritten”; the unwritten part “taught unto the Church by the Spirit without the Scripture” is equal in authority to the written Scripture.26 Conservatives charged that the text alone – without the support of an institutional tradition of explication – was vulnerable to opportunistic manipulation, that Scripture was, in the vivid image of the day, a nose of wax.27 Protestants often pushed back strenuously against this position. William Charke, engaged in controversy with the Jesuit Robert Parsons, asks: “Is not their doctrine generall, to derogate from the authoritie of the scripture: that it is a dead letter, a matter of strife, dark, maymed, vncertaine, a nose of waxe, a leaden rule, a lesbeian building, an occasion of all heresies, which comprehendeth not all thinges necessary to saluation?”28 Thomas Cooper accuses the papists of calling the Bible “a dead writing: A dumb maister, doubtfull, and uncertain: A black Gospell, Dead ynke: Ynkie Diuinitie: A Nose of waxe: A leaden Rule.”29 Though a conformist like Thomas Whitgift was happy to accuse Thomas Cartwright, a leader of the Presbyterian movement, of making the Scripture “a nose of waxe (as the Papistes terme it),” the position was generally and polemically attributed to Roman Catholics.30 But the problem of unwritten traditions continued to vex Protestant thinkers. Whereas Bishop Cooper asserts (in the quotation at the beginning of this chapter) that sacrament and ritual need to be grounded in the Bible, Richard Hooker famously observed that it is difficult to claim that “the books of holy scripture contain in them all necessary things, when of things necessary the very chiefest is to know what books we are bound to esteem holy, which point is confessed impossible for the scripture itself to teach.”31 The proper theological and ecclesiastical relationship of sacrament, ritual, and the Bible was thus highly contested from a variety of confessional perspectives. Compounding the problem was the uncertainty of biblical interpretation. Shakespeare was painfully aware of the degree to which Scripture was both a source of authority and an interpretive problem. He assumes that his audience is not merely acquainted with the Bible and that they will be able to catch references to particular texts, but also that there is a shared awareness of the controversies and problems associated with Scripture

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reading. Richard III, for instance, declares that a facility for scriptural quotation is crucial for the hypocrite: But then I sigh and, with a piece of Scripture, Tell them that God bids us do good for evil. And thus I clothe my naked villainy With odd old ends stol’n forth out of Holy Writ, And seem a saint when most I play the devil.

(1.3.334–8)

Antonio in The Merchant of Venice offers a proverbial version of the same sentiment when he observes: “The devil can cite Scripture” (1.3.96). Holy writ is also invoked as an authority, as when Helena in All’s Well defends her expertise on the grounds that “holy writ in babes hath judgment shown” (2.1.140), recalling Matthew 11:25: “Thou hast hid these things from the wise and men of understanding, and hast opened them unto babes.” More troubling is Iago’s assertion that “Trifles light as air / Are to the jealous confirmations strong / As proofs of Holy Writ” (3.3.338–40). Hamlet, too, explicitly raises the interpretation of Scripture. Before examining direct invocations of the Bible, we should briefly note that, in a broader sense, the play reveals a persistent preoccupation with religious words and the words of religion. When Polonius and Claudius engineer Ophelia’s encounter with Hamlet in Act 3, Polonius gives her a book – probably a prayer book, possibly a Bible – because “show of such an exercise may colour / Your loneliness” (3.1.45–6). Of this stratagem, Polonius sententiously observes that it is too frequently proven “that with devotion’s visage / And pious action we do sugar o’er / The devil himself” (3.1.47–9). This awakens Claudius’s conscience, causing him to comment in an aside about the difference between his “deed” and his “most painted word” (3.1.53). The king’s hypocrisy is soon revisited when Claudius proves unable to pray in the chapel: “Words without thoughts never to heaven go” (3.3.98). At the same time, Hamlet himself has a ready sense of the density of language, its refusal of transparency (as Kristen Poole explores in Chapter 4 of this volume). When Polonius wants to know what Hamlet is reading, he answers, “Words, words, words” (2.2.192). A deliberate non-response, it also happens to be true. The general concern with “wild and whirling words” – a scene of linguistic turbulence – is specifically attached to the question of religion when Hamlet accuses Gertrude of an infidelity so serious that it plucks “the very soul” from “the body of contraction” and “sweet religion makes / A rhapsody of words” (3.4.46–7). Hamlet’s analysis here moves from the concrete “marriage vows / As false as dicers’ oaths” to the abstract idea that “contraction,” the very

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possibility of mutuality, has been destroyed along with religion. Whether contraction is the epitome of religion or an alternative to it, there is no doubt that, according to Hamlet, Gertrude’s oath-breaking has damaged language itself, which can no longer advance true religion.32 Post-Reformation religious controversy, fought in and over language, contributed importantly to the sense that language itself was in a state of disarray. But, in addition to presenting a world of “wild and whirling words,” the play makes several specific references to Scripture. Famously, Hamlet, near the start of his first soliloquy, wishes “that the Everlasting had not fix’d / His canon ’gainst self-slaughter” (1.2.131–2). Hamlet uses “canon” in a general legal sense, but the source of the prohibition is one of the Ten Commandments: “Thou shalt not kill” (Exodus 20.13). The argument that the commandment against killing also covered self-slaughter was commonplace. For example, Henry Smith’s “The Pilgrim’s Wish,” a sermon on Philippians 1:23 (“I desire to be dissolved and to be with Christ”) condemns suicides for taking upon themselves the status of “authors of life & death,” and asks, “But why is it commanded then, thou shall not kill? If thou maist not kill another, much lesse maist thou kill thy selfe.”33 Hamlet then begins with a ready sense of the binding nature of Scripture. His invocation of the Decalogue is interesting because, for the average person in 1600, it was “a relative novelty,” according to John Bossy. As Bossy has shown, in post-Reformation Europe, the Ten Commandments displaced the seven deadly sins as the major vehicle for inculcating Christian ethics. In England they became, alongside the Creed and the Lord’s Prayer, “one of three requisites of Christian knowledge.”34 In October of 1561, Elizabeth ordered her ecclesiastical commissioners to see “that there be fixed upon the wall over the . . . Communion board the Tables of God’s precepts imprinted.”35 That Hamlet’s own ready sense of the binding nature of the commandment against murder subsequently wavers is very much to the point. Whether he is contemplating the murder of Claudius or his own suicide, the Hamlet of Act 3 is not so quick to recognize divine prohibition. In fact, this process begins as early as Act 1, Scene 5. When Hamlet declares to the ghost, “Thy commandment all alone shall live / Within the book and volume of my brain, / Unmix’d with baser matter” (1.5.102–4), the father’s demand for revenge has displaced the canon of the Everlasting. The interpretation and authority of Scripture are most explicitly treated in the gravediggers’ dispute over Adam’s status as a gentleman. Echoing the egalitarianism of John Ball, who famously demanded to know “When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then a gentleman?,” the second gravedigger denies that Adam was armigerous (i.e., that he was

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a gentleman and therefore entitled a coat of arms), providing the first gravedigger with an opportunity to retort, “What, art a heathen? How dost thou understand the Scripture? The Scripture says Adam digged. Could he dig without arms?” (5.1.35–7). Familiarity with the Scripture is what marks the difference between Christian and heathen – and yet this claim is clearly played to comic effect. It is hard not to see this as a parodic version of Tyndale’s idealizing vision of the ploughboy reading Scripture: here the text of Genesis 3:23 becomes a resource for the interpretive acrobatics of a gravedigger who shows no signs of piety. Indeed, the gravedigger’s verbal play provokes Hamlet, who remarks, “We must speak by the card or equivocation will undo us” (5.1.133–4). Hamlet’s desire to maintain a social distance that has been eroded in the last three years – “the toe of the peasant comes so near the heel of the courtier” – is directly connected to the threatening prospect of an insurgent egalitarianism that carries a whiff of Anabaptism and its scriptural argument for community of property. This exchange with the gravedigger not only expresses an unease with Bible reading amongst the lower orders, but exemplifies the anxiety attending interpretation that runs through the play. While the exchange with the gravedigger expresses an unease with Bible reading among the lower orders, Hamlet himself steps forward in the final scene to offer his own explication of the text. Unlike the gravedigger’s paronomastic citation of Genesis, Hamlet cites Matthew 10:29 – again, “Are not two sparrowes solde for a farthing, and one of them shal not fall on the ground without your Father?” – in a way that is entirely serious. Declining to delay the duel with Laertes, Hamlet offers what is in effect a confession of faith: We defy augury. There is special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ’tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all. Since no man, of aught he leaves, knows aught, what is’t to leave betimes? Let be. (5.2.215–20)36

A.C. Bradley describes this passage as expressing “that kind of religious resignation, which, however beautiful in one respect, really deserves the name of fatalism rather than that of Providence.”37 Normally a fine and subtle reader of Shakespeare, Bradley misses the point here. The play is obsessed with the difficulty of establishing warrants for action – it is especially concerned with supernatural warrants that are invoked to trump custom and human law. To declare yourself to be heaven’s “scourge and minister” (3.4.177) is to embark upon a program of antinomian enthusiasm. At the same time, to be a man with a plan is, in the play’s

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logic, to be a plotter, a Machiavel, and a revenger. Claudius is, after all, the play’s planner in chief. Hamlet at the play’s end expresses a delicate balance between humble submission and a readiness to act in response to events. What Bradley criticizes as fatalism others have described as Calvinism. David Daniell, for example, sees Hamlet as distinctively marked by Calvinism.38 A synthetic position is developed by Alan Sinfield, who argues that the play exploits the contradictions of Stoic fatalism and “the embarrassments in Calvinism.”39 Sinfield sharply connects the play’s language to contemporary theological texts, but he is less convincing when it comes to the consequence of these connections. Though Sinfield concedes that there is a “broad compatibility” between Calvin’s Institutes and Hamlet, he concludes “we cannot feel comforted by the world they present.”40 Sinfield is confident that Tudor-Stuart playwrights shared the discomfort that he attributes to present-day readers, and he suggests that the resort to Senecan stoicism was driven by a “deep unease with Christian doctrine as it was customarily preached.”41 Having gone “halfway with Calvin,” these writers “lurch back towards fatalism,” creating tragedy.42 Sinfield, in the end, agrees with Bradley: “Stoic world weariness is felt despite the distinctively Protestant phraseology.”43 Bradley and Sinfield share a fundamental incredulity concerning Calvinism. Not only do they not believe, they have difficulty believing that anybody does. For both, Calvinism collapses back into fatalism, and as a consequence Hamlet’s submissiveness can only be read as fatalism. In contrast, Ewan Fernie suggests that Hamlet’s “distant and strange serenity facilitates rash action.”44 According to Fernie, Hamlet’s “mystical commitment to a ‘special providence’ is inseparable from a commitment to intervening in time”; what Fernie labels “the spirituality of rashness” enables Hamlet “to channel ‘a special providence’ purely and knowingly, with a self-transcending, missionary conviction that he is acting in favour of the absolute.” Fernie is quite serious in making the claim that Hamlet undergoes a “mystical experience”; this experience produces a spiritual indifference that eventuates in a “divinely inspired act.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, Fernie concludes with a reflection on Sulayman Al-bassam’s The AlHamlet Summit, which presents Hamlet as a Euro-trash playboy who undergoes a conversion and then reappears “in the robes of Islamic fundamentalism.” “As the subject of an ambiguous otherwordly act,” writes Fernie, “Hamlet seems disturbingly like a contemporary terrorist.”45 On one level Fernie is right – Hamlet is centrally concerned with the problem of religiously inspired violence – and the present resurgence of such issues makes such historical comparisons inescapable. Religiously

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motivated assassination – an issue also treated in King John – is clearly a concern in Hamlet, a play written during the deepening succession crisis of Elizabeth’s final years. That said, Hamlet’s final act of violence is not “religiously inspired” in any meaningful sense. Indeed, it is more plausible to argue that the play, and Hamlet himself, repudiate such religiously inspired activism. The ghost’s initial demand for revenge presents what Macbeth calls “supernatural soliciting,” yet Hamlet decides he must “try the spirits.” Though this process initially confirms his belief in the ghost, the final act unfolds in very different terms.46 In order to explain why this is the case, a return to Matthew 10 is required. The verse needs to be placed more securely within the theological languages in which it was cited during Shakespeare’s lifetime. Alexandra Walsham attests to the extraordinary popularity of this text, remarking, “Few ministers failed to allude to the text of Matt. X.29–30.”47 There are several points that need to be made here. First, it is a mistake to jump precipitously from Matthew 10:29 to Calvinism, as Sinfield does.48 Special providence is a theological term of art that distinguishes between a general and a particular providence. Clearly, a Calvinist theology of predestination takes the notion of special providence to its logical extreme by asserting that God, before the creation, has elected some to salvation and consigned others to reprobation. The Q1 variant of this phrase is relevant: “predestinate providence,” a formulation that is inescapably Calvinist. However one imagines the relationship between Q1 and Q2, it is clear that “special Providence” is less distinctively marked in confessional terms. Indeed, Charlotte Methuen identifies the source of the distinction in Aquinas, but argues that sixteenth-century Lutheran theology was responsible for introducing the distinction between “providentia specialis” and “providentia generalis.”49 In fact, the phrase “special providence” is also used by Catholic writers in the later part of the sixteenth century. The Protestant Edmund Bunny’s Christian Directory (1584) advises those who are suffering tribulation to consider “this matter of persecution commeth not by chance or casualtie, or by any general direction from the higher powers: but by the special providence and peculiar disposition of God: as Christ showeth at large in Saint Mathews Gospel.”50 Bunny’s Directory is plagiarized wholesale from the work of Robert Parsons, a Catholic; in Parson’s own version of the text, which is centrally concerned with the persecution faced by English Catholics, the very same language is used, the same text cited.51 It is not surprising to find this text and the idea of special providence being used in a broad range of homiletic literature counseling those who find themselves afflicted. Of course, the idea of special providence was also

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deployed and developed in a way that was at odds with Catholic doctrine. William Perkins, who had great success popularizing Calvinism for a lay audience, writes that the strong desire of earthly things is an impediment to good conscience: The remedie is to learn the lesson of Paul, Phil. 4. 12. which is in euery estate in which God shall place vs to be content; esteeming euermore the present condition the best for vs of all. Now that this lesson may be learned, we must further labour to be resolued of God’s special prouidence towards vs in euery case & condition of life: & when we have so well profited in the schoole of Christ, that we can see and acknowledge Gods prouidence & goodness, as well in sicknes as in health, in pouerty as in wealth, in hunger as in fulnes, in life as in death, we shall be very well content, whatsoever any way befalls vnto vs.52

According to Perkins, every cross and every deliverance offers the godly Christian an opportunity to be “resolued of God’s special providence towards vs.” This sort of careful evaluation of events in an effort to read God’s will as it pertains to the individual believer is a marked feature of the strenuous spiritual self-scrutiny that has been called experimental predestinarianism.53 Perkins also invokes special providence in his dismissal of the Catholic last rites. This instance is especially relevant to Hamlet. In his treatise on “the right way of dying well,” Perkins spends several pages dealing with the erroneous opinions of the Catholics; he dismisses the need for the Eucharist and scathingly describes final unction as “this greasie sacrament of the Papists.” According to Perkins, the proper preparation for death involves three distinct duties: “one concerning God, the other concerning man’s own self, the third concerning our neighbor.” The first obligation is to seek to be reconciled to God through faith and repentance: “So soone as a man shall feele any manner of sicknesse to seaze upon his bodie, hee must consider with himselfe whence it ariseth: and after serious consideration, hee shal find that it comes not by chance or fortune, but by the special providence of God.”54 The duties concerning oneself include meditation on the benefits of death; the first of “innumerable” examples is “borrowed from the speciall providence of God; namely that the death of every man, much more of every child of God, is not onely foreseene, but also forappointed of God . . . The very hayres of our heads are numbered (as our Sauiour Christ saith) and a sparrow lights not on the ground without the will of our heavenly father.” The duties to one’s neighbors include in the first place reconciliation, “whereby he is freely to forgive all men, and to desire to be forgiven of all.” Perkins adds a second duty for “those which are rulers

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and gouernours of others”: they “must haue care and take order that their charges committed to them by God, be left in good estate after their death.”55 For Perkins, “the right way of dying well” has no ritual component; instead, it involves an attention to God, the self, and society. Now, Hamlet’s speech that begins “We defy augury!” is clearly a meditation on the inescapability of death and the need for preparation; “the readiness is all” (5.2.218) could be said to sum up the entire ars moriendi tradition from its medieval sources to William Perkins and beyond. But while Hamlet does not entirely conform to Perkins’s program, there are important points of contact. Unlike the apparition – “Unhousel’d, disappointed, unanel’d, / No reck’ning made” – Hamlet will not be surprised by death. Moreover, Hamlet makes no mention of the ritual preparations cataloged by the ghost. Indeed, whatever else it may show, the chapel scene suggests that Hamlet does not recognize the need for priestly confession and absolution. He assumes that a direct confession to God has efficaciously purged Claudius’s soul and that he is “fit and season’d” (3.3.85–6) for death. What matters most to Hamlet as the play concludes is the way that he is able make his experience conform to the assurance offered by the text of Matthew 10:29. The story he tells to Horatio emphasizes the way in which a seemingly contingent series of events – his rash decision to act on an intuition and examine the commission, the lucky arrival of the pirates, the fact that he learned to write fair when a boy, his possession of his father’s signet ring – combine to effect his rescue. Together these events confirm the text of Matthew 10:29, and the text, in turn, convinces him he must be prepared for imminent death. This is not, as so many modern critics have suggested, fatalism. But nor is it the enthusiasm of the saint who, filled with the spirit, prepares to do violence upon the enemies of the Lord. What Hamlet has given over is the peculiar narcissism that allowed him to think that he was born to set the world right. An unbearable responsibility and a presumptuous claim, this way of thinking is rectified by his recognition of “a divinity that shapes our ends” (5.2.10). Crucially, Hamlet’s conversion is a result of bringing Scripture to bear on his own experience. In this sense, it is “experimental,” but it does not extend to a consideration of Hamlet’s own election. Moreover, this providential assurance does not license murder and revenge. When Hamlet finally kills Claudius he does so thinking first of his poisoned mother, not his father. Laertes, who knows nothing of Old Hamlet’s murder, concludes that Claudius is “justly serv’d” before asking Hamlet to “Exchange forgiveness” (5.2.333, 334). Hamlet’s dying words – “the rest is silence” – have

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the “elemental simplicity” of biblical English, but they do not afford a conventional confirmation of faith.56 Hamlet’s failure to provide such a declaration is remedied by Horatio’s wish that “flights of angels sing thee to thy rest” (5.2.365). Horatio picks up and repeats Hamlet’s rest, but whereas Hamlet’s use of the word is ambiguous – the rest could be the silent remainder of his fleeting life or it could be a description of the silence of death as a final rest – Horatio’s rest is clearly celestial, the silence of the grave replaced by a chorus of angels hymning Hamlet’s glory as he ascends to heaven. The audience may join Horatio in his wish for Hamlet’s afterlife, but if the play has established anything it is that such matters are beyond human knowledge. And yet the wish remains, the thought that Hamlet is finally, after so many curious considerations, after such vicissitudes of anger and loss, at peace. It is no small irony, then, that the very next thing we hear is the sound of drums, provoking Horatio’s question: “Why does the drum come hither?” The irony is only increased by the manner in which Fortinbras plans to solemnize Hamlet’s passing. He is to be given a military funeral, made into the image of Fortinbras, the man he never was: “For his passage, / The soldier’s music and the rite of war / Speak loudly for him” (5.2.403–5). This final rite is undamaged, but it is also entirely secular and conspicuously empty. Hamlet does not settle the troubled relationship between word and rite. Instead, the play offers a sophisticated engagement with the vexed questions raised by the still unsteady Elizabethan Settlement. On the one hand, it presents a searching account of the efficacy and purpose of ritual, a category that includes a restricted set of sacraments as well as the general notion of ceremony. On the other hand, it responds to the postReformation emphasis on the authority of Scripture with an account of the slipperiness of language and the threat that “equivocation will undo us.” And yet, despite the worry over “wild and whirling words,” Matthew 10:29 is presented as a simple text, a reliable confirmation of a providential order that remains fundamentally mysterious.

chapter 12

Political Theology from the Pulpit and the Stage: Sir Thomas More, Richard II, and Henry V Thomas Fulton

Sir Thomas More survives in an unusual form: a heavily revised manuscript revealing a team of collaborators who revisited the play over a long period. As the Arden edition presents it, the original text is by Anthony Munday and Henry Chettle, then censored by the Master of Revels Edmund Tilney, and later revised through the coordinating editorial help of “Hand C” by Chettle, Thomas Dekker, Thomas Heywood, and William Shakespeare, commissioned to write the long, sermonizing speeches of the title character.1 The play has drawn increasing attention in recent years not only because of this extraordinary record of collaboration, but also because it boldly attempts to retell relatively recent Tudor history around the troubled origins of English Protestantism.2 The drama begins with mounting tensions on the streets of London before the Evil Mayday Riots of 1517, in a scene probably written by Munday and Chettle. The censorious Tilney strikes through the entire scene, writing a blustery directive in the margin: “Leave out the insurrection wholly and the cause thereof and begin with Sir Thomas More . . . only by a short report, and not otherwise, at your own perils.”3 The offending scene provides a stark contrast to the sermonizing words of Shakespeare’s More, who manages – with staged biblical readings – to calm the crowd. In this early scene, the London citizens scheme to collaborate with preachers, using sermons as a mode of disseminating their protest: You know the Spital sermons begin the next week. I have drawn a of our wrongs and the strangers’ insolencies. george betts Which he means the preachers shall there openly publish in the pulpit. … sherwin [to lincoln] But how find ye the preachers affected to ? lincoln

The passage is of great interest for what it suggests about the responsive capacity of the pulpit in its immediate political context. The Spital 204

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Sermons were originally preached in the churchyard of the Hospital (or Spital) of St. Mary, and became an annual post-Easter London event. The passage is of great interest for what it suggests about the responsive capacity of the pulpit in its immediate political context. The citizens, the play suggests, would find a sympathetic preacher and put “such matter in his sermon” (1.111), making the preacher and pulpit vehicles by which social movements can be engendered and legitimated. The play suggests that the oral performance or “publish[ing]” of a sermon was at least as effective as Tilney’s feared performance of the same material on stage. This is an extraordinary passage in the now enlarged corpus of Shakespearean drama, in which the entirety of this play, rather than merely the passages by “Hand D,” are included in collections of Shakespeare’s work.4 The scribal evidence invites us to see collaborative unity but also authorial difference, and to consider how Shakespeare’s pulpits and churchmen differ from those of his close collaborators. In his more canonical history plays, Shakespeare’s churchmen were not “preachers” of the middling sort. Instead, largely because of the court orientation of Shakespeare’s histories, his churchmen are high officers of the church: bishops, archbishops, cardinals, and even (in the rare Protestant case of Henry VIII) monarchs, given the role after the English Reformation of the “Supreme Head of the Church.” Richard II, for instance, features the Bishop of Carlisle and the Abbot of Westminster; Richard III brings the Archbishops of Canterbury and York to the stage, along with the Bishop of Ely. Henry VIII, co-written with the son of a bishop, is even more populated with high-ranking churchmen, including Cardinal Wolsey, Cardinal Campeius, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Bishop of Lincoln, and several more. Unlike Munday’s or Chettle’s lowly preachers who play before popular audiences within the drama, Shakespeare’s churchmen play before aristocratic audiences. In such roles, Shakespeare’s churchmen are the managers of statecraft, purveyors of dynastic and state interests, or – like the bishops dominating the opening of Henry V – defenders of their own immensely endowed self-interests against those of other court factions. If not always set in a Tudor context, such stage bishops often reflect the sermons, homilies, and official ideologies of Elizabethan and Jacobean rather than medieval England. This chapter concerns itself with the biblical passages used by Shakespeare’s churchmen in the construction of statecraft, asking how these passages are interpreted on the stage, and how they reflect contemporary political discourse sermonized from the pulpit.

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A number of biblical passages played a vital role in defining royal authority around the general question of the nature of obedience to a divinely ordained “minister of God” (Romans 13:1–7). But there were also passages specific to Elizabeth’s role as queen, since female rule had been decried by John Knox as the “monstrous regiment of women,”5 and by Christopher Goodman (aiming then at Mary I) in the resistance tract, How superior powers oght to be obeyd of their subjects: and wherin they may lawfully by Gods Worde be disobeyed and resisted (Geneva, 1558). Designed to unseat Catholic queens, but inopportunely published in the year of Elizabeth’s accession, this political misogyny found support in biblical citations such as 1 Timothy 2:12, in which Paul suffers “not a woman to teache, nether to usurpe authoritie over the man, but for to be in silence,” and 1 Corinthians 14:34, “Let your women keepe silence in the congregations: for it is not permitted vnto them to speake, but they are commanded to be under obedience, as also the Law saith” – the “Law” here gesturing back to God’s command in Genesis 3:16 that (according to Goodman) “the woman be in subjection to her husbande” and thus forbidden to be “Ruler of a Realme or nation.”6 All of these arguments against the rule of women were intensely reinforced by polemicists, biblical translators, and annotators, but also – importantly – by ministers: as William Whittingham explains in his introduction, Goodman’s fiery tract was originally a sermon on Acts 4:19, “Judge whether it be juste before God to obey you [rulers] rather than God.” Even pamphlets that do not title themselves “sermons” often began life as a text spoken or performed in the pulpit. To understand Shakespeare’s relationship with the political pulpit, I explore two rather different biblical passages in the construction of English politics: Romans 13:1–7, and (to a much lesser extent) Numbers 27:8, a passage used to counter the invalidation of female rule. Romans 13: 1–7 is the most dominant biblical passage in Shakespeare, and quite possibly the most frequently cited biblical passage of the Reformation. In contrast to the productive use of the secularist conception of political theology developed by Carl Schmitt and others, interpretation of this text by early reformers, I argue, was political theology in a thoroughly religious sense, fostered by a monarchism in figures such as William Tyndale that ran as deep as the sea, but also by the theology of predestination, which suited the arbitrary quality of kingship. The intensive application of these verses on political obedience was reinforced by Protestant literalism, a method of reading the Bible that saw no easy way around Paul’s theory of divine right. Yet, as I suggest, a new model of political theology seems to emerge late in Tudor England. The very dominance of a biblical verse on God’s

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special ordinance in Shakespeare, often in interrogative constructions, suggests – some seven decades after the Reformation – that there was something troubling about the orthodox Protestant reading in late Elizabethan England. I will argue that Shakespeare’s extensive and yet somewhat cautious treatment of this verse ultimately ironizes the literalist interpretation that shaped Reformation readings.

Romans 13 and the Divinity that Doth Hedge a King Romans 13:1–7 is the central biblical text behind the combination of sacred and state in Renaissance political theology. I explore different early modern translations below, but the standard King James wording, which closely follows the Elizabethan Bishops’ Bible, is the best place to begin: Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God. Whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God: and they that resist shall receive to themselves damnation. For rulers [“princes” in the early 1560 Geneva text; “Magistrates” in the post-1576 Geneva text] are not a terror to good works, but the evil. Wilt thou then not be afraid of the power? Do that which is good, and thou shalt have praise of the same: For he is the minister of God to thee for good. But if thou do that which is evil, be afraid; for he beareth not the sword in vain: for he is the minister of God, a revenger to execute wrath upon him that doeth evil. Wherefore ye must needs be subject, not only for wrath, but also for conscience sake.

Other major early modern English translations used the word “ruler” as opposed to “Magistrate” in the popular Geneva Bible after 1576, with the idea being that the monarch alone is endowed with God’s own power (symbolized by the sword) over life and death. Using the method of “collocation” discussed by Tom Bishop in this volume (Chapter 6), some authors qualified Paul’s statement, as the margins of many Geneva Bibles after 1576 do, with a statement reportedly made by Peter in Acts: “We ought to obey God rather than men” (Acts 5:29), the subject of Goodman’s sermon.7 The “minister of God,” repeated twice in Romans 13, lent itself to early Protestant readings of the king as a kind of “minister” in a church sense. As Bishop Hugh Latimer, preaching before King Edward, stated, “Consider the presence of the King’s majesty, God’s high Vicar in earth . . . and consider that he is God’s high minister [Romans 13:4–6] . . . Long we have been servants and in bondage, serving the Pope in Egypt.”8

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Romans 13:1–7 is the most commonly referenced biblical passage of this length – that is, of a cluster of verses, rather than a single verse – in all of Shakespeare.9 The most often-cited single lines in Shakespeare are Matthew 5:44 (“Love your enemies”) and Genesis 3:19 (“thou art dust, and to dust shalt thou return,” which also derives from the Book of Common Prayer’s funeral service). But this longer section at Romans 13:1–7 appears onstage at least twenty-six times in Shakespeare’s dramatic corpus, and with particular intensity in the history plays: in Richard II, Henry V, and the multiauthored and generically layered Sir Thomas More. That play’s Shakespearean section contains the most overt reference to the Pauline doctrine of Romans 13 in all of Shakespeare, as the character More, in trying to quell the riot, calls on “th’apostle” – that is, Paul – himself to speak on the sin of disobedience: “First, ’tis a sin / Which oft th’apostle did forwarn us of, / Urging obedience to authority” (6.105–107). Shakespeare’s orating theologian tells the citizens of London that God (or the Bible) “has lent the king His figure, / His throne and sword, . . . [and] calls him a god on earth” (6.116–18). The phrasing “god on earth” represents the Protestant rhetoric about kingship that emerged powerfully when the king became supreme head of the church in 1534. Ultimately, contradicting his own case to the citizens, More would not accept the king as supreme head, refused the Oath of Supremacy, and was nonetheless sent “to the state of states” (17.128). Shakespeare’s readings of Romans 13 occur frequently in the mouths of high churchmen or monarchs. The frequency of allusion is not merely linguistic; as I have argued elsewhere, Shakespeare uses this passage in Measure for Measure in a structural and allegorical manner, when “Angelo” takes on “the sword of heaven” (3.2.261), given him by a Duke who “Elected him” and “lent him,” as Shakespeare had More say, “our terror, dressed him with our love” (1.1.18–19).10 In the present chapter, I would like to suggest a similarly structural use of this biblical passage, in addition to the linguistic allusions to it, in Richard II and Henry V. A wide spectrum of readings of Romans 13 was available to Shakespeare, falling into three major groups: the dominant reading of the Church of England, sometimes qualified by Acts 5:29; the emergent reading of Calvin, which complicates the centrality of the monarch; and the radical historicist reading of Erasmus. Raymond Williams’s paradigm of the residual, dominant, and emergent forms of belief supplies a tantalizingly close explanatory structure for the residual medieval Catholic, the increasingly dominant Church of England, and the emergent nonconformist arguments, even though nonconformist arguments often seemed backwards

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rather than progressive, and the radical position Erasmus represents – in many ways more properly emergent – is quickly set aside.11 Centrist Counter-Reformation thought divided allegiance more between secular (monarchal) and spiritual (papal), as the notes on Romans 13 in an English Catholic translation of the New Testament in 1582 show. These notes stress “the obedience of Catholikes both to Spiritual and temporal Superiors,” in contrast to “[t]he Protestants of our time,” who “care neither for the one nor for the other, though they extol onely the secular when it maketh for them,” while “[t]he Catholikes onely most humbly obey both, even according to Gods ordinance, the one in temporal causes, and the other in Spiritual.”12 When not being disparaged by their Catholic contemporaries, Protestants seemed to ignore this distinction in their professions of allegiance. The majority of printed Protestant interpretations, and certainly those heard in sermons, such as the Homily against Disobedience and Wilful Rebellion (1571), even go so far as to omit the exception from Acts 5:29, to obey God rather than men. As the Homily intones with mild though seemingly unselfconscious exaggeration: As in reading of the holy Scriptures we shall find in very many and almost infinite places as well of the Old Testament as of the New, that kings and princes, as well the evil as the good, do reign by God’s ordinance, and that subjects are bounden to obey them; that God doth give princes wisdom, great power, and authority; that God defendeth them against their enemies, and destroyeth their enemies horribly.13

Strange as it is, the Homily echoes Tyndale’s position in the Obedience of a Christian Man (1528): obey the king; let God judge if and when he goes off course, for that too is a punishment for our own sins.14 This dominant English Reformation reading would be complicated, as I will show, by Calvin, creating the main tension in English conceptions of obedience. Just before the Reformation, Erasmus, following the Oxford theologian and early humanist John Colet, offered a radical reconsideration of Paul.15 Erasmus’s project of annotating and retranslating the New Testament appeared in 1516, a year before Luther posted his ninety-five theses, and his New Testament became the basis for Luther’s and Tyndale’s subsequent vernacular New Testaments of 1522 and 1525/6 respectively. In the same remarkable year of 1516, Erasmus published The Education of a Christian Prince, which brilliantly hinged on the historicist reading of Romans 13 he had undertaken in the Annotations on the New Testament. Erasmus points out here that “minister” does not mean anything other than “agent,” and argued that “Paul was aware that some Christians, under

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the pretext of religion, were refusing the orders of their rulers, and that as a result the established order would be upset and all things thrown into disarray.” It was these historical circumstances that brought Paul to teach that “they should obey any one at all entrusted with public authority – making exception for the interests of faith and piety.” Erasmus argues that Paul himself had contrived this notion of divinely ordained power not because it was true, but because it was expedient. In the annotations to the passage, Erasmus suggests that the words of Paul were meant to apply only to a pagan magistrate, though again he asserts this with subtle irony: “True, these very rulers are pagan (ethnici) and evil; but the order is still good.”16 Erasmus continues to stress the difference between pagan and Christian in his note to Romans 13:7–8: “Pay to everyone what is owed: tribute to whom tribute is owed . . . owe no one anything”; “It can be understood in such a way that the previous words [that is, 13:7, pay tribute] refer to magistrates who were pagan (magistratus ethnicos), as they all were at that time; what follows – [owe] no one anything etc. – refers to Christians: ‘pay them [the magistrates] what you owe, but a Christian owes a Christian nothing except mutual love’.”17 In The Education of a Christian Prince, published in the same year, Erasmus emphasizes the full implications of the distinction between pagan and Christian princes, using historicism, as Kathy Eden has noted, “as a tool of dissent.”18 His historicist rendering of Romans 13 supplies him with the very distinction implied in the title between a Christian and a pagan prince. Pointing toward the well-known verse, Erasmus writes, Do not let it escape you that what is said . . . about the need to endure masters, obey officials, do honour to the king . . . is to be taken as referring to pagan princes . . . But what does he go on to say about Christians? ‘you ought not,’ he says, ‘to have any debts among yourselves, except to love one another.’ (Romans 13:8)

The relationship of a Christian prince to his subjects must therefore be understood in a radically new light – and not by the doctrines set down by Paul in Romans 13: “Is it the right of a pagan prince to oppress his people by fear . . . to plunder their goods and finally make martyrs of them: that is a pagan prince’s right. You do not want the Christian Prince to have the same, do you?”19 This unhinging of politics from theology represents a peculiarly visionary moment, a calm in 1516 just before the storm of 1517. According to his reading, political theology has no place in the court of a Christian prince: Paul only meant this for heathens, and he did not actually mean it at all. As much as Tyndale loved Erasmus, his reading of

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Romans 13 – central to his and to Luther’s conception of political theology – could not have been more divergent. Suddenly, and almost universally, Erasmus’s Paul vanished, seemingly without a trace. Romans 13 was read literally. Whether this means that few people paid attention to Erasmus’s reading, which seems impossible, or that they preferred the dominant reading of reformers because it was more pious, or because they were afraid to contradict Romans 13 publically, remains unclear. The Geneva Bible’s marginal notes on Romans 13 mildly attempt to hedge that passage’s most absolutist implications by adding the exception from Acts 5:29 after 1576, but it is still hard to get around its fundamental message. The first couple of verses assert the divine ordination of earthly authority: “Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers: for there is no power but of God: & the powers that be, are ordained of God. Whosoever therefore resisteth power, resisteth the ordinance of God. And they that resist, shall receive to themselves judgement” – this final word in the Geneva text, “judgement,” follows Erasmus (“iudicium accipient”; the word “damnation” in the Bishops’ Bible and the King James Version are actually closer to the Vulgate (“damnationem acquirunt”).20 The central political role of Romans 13 in Tudor England is illustrated in the iconic image of Henry by Hans Holbein the Younger on the title page of the first full printed English Bible, the Coverdale Bible of 1535 – one of the most important biblical paratexts in the history of the English Bible (see Figure 12.1). The sword is the symbol of secular power that derives from Paul’s words in Romans 13:4 – then marked as 13a – that “But yff thou do evell, then feare, for he [the prince] beareth not the swerde for naughte.”21 Coverdale glosses Romans 13 in a way that seems to glance at Holbein’s portrait of the king in his prefatory words that “[The Bible] declareth most aboundauntly that the office, auctorite and power geven of God unto kynges, is in earth above all other powers: let them call themselves Popes, Cardynalles, or what so ever they will, the worde of god declareth them (yee and commanundeth them under payne of dampnacion) to be obedient unto the temporall swerde[.]”22 Romans 13 also legitimated the refutation of papal power. Luther’s central case against papal power in An Open Letter to the Christian Nobility (1520) relied on Romans 13: “For thus saith St. Paul to all Christians: ‘Let every soul (I take that to mean the Pope’s soul also) be subject unto the higher powers, for they bear not the sword in vain, but are the ministers of God’.”23 The supremacy of the monarch over the Pope is also asserted in the post-1576 Geneva gloss to Romans 13: “therefore the tyranny of the Pope over all kingdomes must downe to the ground.”24

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Figure 12.1 Detail of Henry VIII with sword and Bible from Hans Holbein’s title page of the Coverdale Bible (1535). By permission of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

Fittingly, Holbein’s biblical image of Henry VIII was reconstructed in Foxe’s Book of Martyrs to show the king standing over – and crushing – the Pope.25 The literalist approach to Romans 13 became pervasive in Tudor England, spoken not only by bishops and kings and people at the top of the

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power structure, but also by the violently persecuted, such as Tyndale. At this moment, political theology seems as close to true religion as anything else theological – not an Erasmian rhetorical structure, a Schmittian metaphor (as discussed in the concluding section), nor as yet any presage of secularism. Yet if we look at the ways in which Shakespeare replays this scene of biblical commentary on kingship, and echoes the language of Romans 13 throughout his texts, we begin to see some element of questioning – and doubt – about this interpretation. In Richard II, the biblical text has a deeply structural role. When Gaunt speaks to the Duchess of Gloucester, he suggests that they were powerless to redress the wrongs against them: God’s is the quarrel, for God’s substitute, His deputy anointed in His sight, Hath caus’d his death, the which if wrongfully, Let heaven revenge, for I may never lift An angry arm against His minister.

(1.2.37–41)26

Shakespeare weaves the text of Romans 13 into Gaunt’s defense, drawing particular attention to the inviolability of the “minister” of God. The passage stresses a Tyndalian reading that is central to official Tudor Protestant ideology. Yet the text also seems to represent a tension between Tyndale’s and Calvin’s readings of Romans 13, which would allow Gaunt and Bolingbroke, as nobility, to rise up against an unjust king. Calvin uses the term magistratus rather than princeps in rendering Romans 13, allowing him to make the distinction that God gives not just monarchs the ordained sword, but high magistrates, who can in some cases use the sword against the monarch.27 In Elizabethan translations of Calvin’s Institution of the Christian Religion, the word “Parliaments” was used in a marginal gloss to make clear in an English context what Calvin means when he demands that “magistrates” remember their God-given duty when kings stray. The pontifical use of “I” in combination with words such as “forbid” show the assumed authority of a highly trained hermeneut (such as Calvin) in the sixteenth century: I doe so not forbid them [magistrates] according to their office to withstand the outraging licentiousnesse of kings: that I affirme that if they winke at kings willfully ranging over and treading downe the poore communalty, their dissembling is not without wicked breach of faith, because they deceitfully betray the liberty of the people, whereof they know themselves to bee appointed protectors by the ordinance of God.28

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The Tyndalian notion of kingship is challenged in Richard II when when it is put into the mouth of Richard II as the success of Bolingbroke becomes increasingly imminent: “The breath of worldly men cannot depose / The deputy elected by the Lord” (3.2.56–7). Richard is responding to the Bishop of Carlisle, who had been trying to urge him to take action, because he could not simply rely on God’s help: “That Power that made you king / Hath the power to keep you king in spite of all” – but it must be “imbras’d,” and “not neglected” (3.2.27–30). Richard’s word “elected,” with his misguided confidence, reinforces the connection between this view of political theology and the Protestant theology of predestination – though it cannot hold back the deposition. The king seems dangerously misled by his Tyndalian reading of Paul. The incoherence between the bishop’s Catholic view that Richard should exercise his will to sustain God’s offered grace and Richard’s anachronistically Protestant language in response suggests that the application of such theological paradigms to political realities is ultimately unsustainable. While these passages show the problematic and inconsistent interpretations of Romans 13 in Reformation political theology, they nonetheless lack the sharp irony found in Claudius’s broader evocation of divine right ideology in “Such divinity doth hedge a king” (Hamlet 4.5.124), suggesting that the claim is empty of truth and dangerous. Similarly, in Richard III, when the tyrant king is approached by his mother, among other critics, Richard ironically invokes Psalm 105.5, saying, “Let not the heavens hear these tell-tale women / Rail on the Lord’s anointed” (4.4.154–5). Shakespeare may not be quite as daring as John Donne is when he states at the end of Satire 3, citing Romans 13, that we cannot trust “men’s unjust / Power from God claimed,” and that kings and queens are not “vicars, but hangmen to Fate.”29 Donne flatly dismisses the view of Tudor theologians such as Archbishop Latimer, who asserted precisely that the monarch was “Vicar” in his reading of “high minister” in Romans 13:4. But unlike Donne, whose Satires were only in manuscript – and even then he expressed concern that there belonged “some feare”30 to their existence – Shakespeare’s writing for the stage had to pass the censorious eyes of Tilney and, increasingly, for the many plays performed at court, the eyes of Elizabeth and James. Yet, like Henry V, to which I turn in conclusion, Richard II daringly explores some of the deep inconsistencies of the Christian doctrine of obedience. Through exploring the model of a “Christian Prince” in Henry V, Shakespeare draws on Erasmus’s Education of a Christian Prince, yet he significantly avoids or ignores Erasmus’s dismissive historicist reading of Romans 13.

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The Education of a Christian Prince in Henry V J. H. Walter and Andrew Gurr long ago showed the many instances of connection between Shakespeare’s Henry V and Erasmus’s Christian prince, suggesting that Shakespeare had carefully contrived the play in ways that would engage Erasmus’s text.31 The idea of Henry as a Christian prince is reinforced early in the play, first in his address to the ambassadors, then by the Chorus, who calls him “the mirror of all Christian kings” (2.0.6), echoing the “mirror for magistrates” genre, but unusually repeating a construction, “Christian king,” that is unique in Shakespeare’s corpus to this play, invoking Erasmus’s ironic distinction. Earlier in the play, Henry, addressing the French ambassadors, claims, “We are no tyrant, but a Christian king, / Unto whose grace our passion is as subject / As are our wretches fetter’d in our prisons” (1.2.241–3). The contrast of “tyrant” and “Christian king” suggests a missing non-Christian epithet such as “heathen” tyrant or “Turk.” Also like Erasmus, Shakespeare provides a profound rethinking of Romans 13 toward the end of the play. Henry V begins with an intensely biblical interaction between bishops and the king in a way that is reminiscent of Holbein’s portrait and its cultural aftermath. The opening is notable for an unusually detailed scene in which bishops present a biblical reading to their monarch, even invoking, in a very rare instance, the name of a biblical book. The young king asks his bishops’ permission to go to war: “May I with right and conscience make this claim?” (1.2.96). The terse request is answered by a series of hairsplitting arguments from the archbishop that begins with a biblical citation. In a historically nuanced performance of Henry V at the Folger Shakespeare Library in 2013, directed by Robert Richmond, the Bible was used as a prop, held by the bishop, who pointed to the passage as he spoke: The sin upon my head, dread sovereign! For in the book of Numbers is it writ: When the man dies, let the inheritance Descend unto the daughter.

(1.2.97–100)32

This scene, though not alluding directly to Romans 13, arguably reconstructs the popular imagistic interpretation of this text, in which Tudor bishops bow to but also instruct the monarch, holding the Bible up in reverence as the latter receives it, simultaneously holding it and the sword. Henry’s legitimacy stands on a biblical text reinforcing the political inheritance of daughters, and as such Henry stands in for Elizabeth.

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Numbers 27 is a passage of extraordinary importance for Elizabeth. An array of scriptural passages had been adduced to discredit the rule of women, as mentioned, and the scene replays a reading of Numbers 27 by Elizabeth’s own Bishop John Jewel. Jewel argued the case for her legitimacy against reformers who had, as Jewel wrote, “laide togeather at Geneua, touchinge the gouernemente of Women,”33 and – in Knox’s case especially – had repudiated the applicability of Numbers 27 to support the female inheritance of the throne.34 In the interest of brevity, meter, or reinforcing daughters, Shakespeare has removed “without a sonne,” from the biblical citation, but it seems likely that both Shakespeare and Holinshed are drawing from the use of Numbers as it was represented by Jewel – himself a former Marian exile and disciple of Peter Martyr.35 Jewel’s Apology of the Church of England was a widely reprinted statement of national Protestant identity that first appeared in 1562. It was attacked by Thomas Harding, a Catholic exile who had been confessor to Bishop Gardiner during Mary’s reign. Jewel renounces earlier Protestant ideas about the regiment of queens, which Harding had used. Instead, and even against some major Reformation figures, Jewel remains defiant that the legitimacy for Elizabeth’s rule stands on the ground of Numbers 27: The Heades of Englande, and Scotlande, that, as ye saie, were laide togeather at Geneua, touchinge the gouernemente of Women, beinge wel accoumpted, were nothinge so many, as ye woulde seeme to imagine. For if there had benne but one lesse, for ought, that I haue hearde, there had benne but one at al. Sutche hoate Amplifications it liketh you to make of so smal a number. Wée wil defende noman in his erroure. Let every man beare his owne guilte. M. Caluine, M. Martyr, M. Musculus, M. Bullinger, and others, whom you cal the Faithful Brothers of Englande, misliked that enterprise, and wrote againste it. Wée knowe, that God hath determined this mater longe sithence: For thus he saith, [Number. 27 in margin] Si Homo moriatur absque Filio, ad Filiam eius transibit Hereditas: If a Man die without a Sonne, his enheritance shal passe vnto his Daughter.36

Jewel’s surprising dismissal of the great continental theologians shows the profound importance of reaffirming the legitimacy of his queen with Numbers 27:7–11. Shakespeare’s Henry is often viewed as a direct mirror of Queen Elizabeth, who may have been part of an intended audience, and replaying this biblical passage in this context would not only have had nationalist implications, it would have served to draw the parallel between Henry and Elizabeth still closer.37 Shakespeare’s prominent use of Numbers 27 – especially if he, too, had used a biblical prop – sets his audience up for the sustained reading of

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Romans 13 toward the end of the battle with France. If the text reinforces a sense of legitimacy for the queen at the beginning, it undermines another form of legitimacy at the end, when Henry speaks with Bates and Williams in the guise of another soldier. “For though I speak to you,” says the king in disguise, “I think the King is but a man, as I am” (4.1.102). The king prompts the two soldiers to consider the moral problems of obedience. k. henry williams bates

williams

Methinks I could not die anywhere so contented as in the King’s company, his cause being just and his quarrel honorable. That’s more than we know. Ay, or more than we should seek after; for we know enough, if we know we are the King’s subjects. If his cause be wrong, our obedience to the King wipes the crime of it out of us. But if the cause be not good, the King himself hath a heavy reckoning to make, when all those legs, and arms, and heads, chopp’d off in a battle, shall join together at the latter day and cry all, “We all died at such a place.” (4.1.119–38)

The discussion takes Romans 13 to its logical conclusion, omitting Peter’s exception that the king should not be obeyed if his cause is wrong, and subtly elicits some of the inconsistencies in early modern political doctrine. The churchman Pierre Du Moulin the younger stated that subjects who obeyed a lawful command “are not answerable of the consequence that may follow, but they that command it.”38 While such statements might neatly remove the subject from responsibility, their absurdity becomes especially apparent when viewed, as in Henry V, from the eyes of the recipient of all this lumped responsibility, the king.39 The skirting of this issue comes as a natural consequence of the kind of dominant rhetoric of Tudor ideology. But their discussion is troubled by this omission, and Henry’s attempt to refute Williams’s conclusion – that the king is responsible for the sin of the obedient subject – comes at the cost of a rather conspicuous breach of reasoning. Henry brings both of the soldiers around to agree that “Every subject’s duty is the King’s, but every subject’s soul is his own” (176–7), which is concordant with the doctrine of Peter in Acts. The soldiers’ agreement comes in defiance of their original claim that “we know enough if we are the King’s subjects,” for “if his cause be wrong, our obedience to the King wipes the crime of it out of us,” and thus, as the obedient soldiers are then not responsible for the wrongs they commit, “the King himself [if the cause be not good] hath a heavy reckoning to make.” Gurr points out that the king and the soldiers “have conspicuously left untouched in the light of contemporary discussions . . . the key question of the king’s responsibility

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for the deaths of good men in an unjust quarrel.”40 Williams’s vivid description of the horrors of war, coupled with the slip of reasoning he seems to make, raises some discomfort, though we are perhaps won over, like the soldiers, by Henry’s dazzling oration. But Shakespearean audiences, accustomed to the rhetoric of civil obedience, would have been much more attuned to the elision that occurs in Williams’s reasoning, and to the fact that Henry does not really address the question of a bad cause. Thus, even while shadowing Erasmus’s model of a Christian prince, Shakespeare’s text approaches its critique of Romans 13 from a philosophical rather than a rhetorical and historicist angle, exposing the potential dangers of allowing “every soul [to] be subject” to the king without allowing that the soul must be individually accountable. When left alone, Henry meditates painfully, as if accepting the reality of their claims, rather than the confidence of his rebuttal: “Let . . . our sins lay on the King! We must bear all” (4.1.230–2). He then goes on to ask whether there is any difference between a king and “private men.” Whereas Paul declared that the monarch deserves special reverence as a minister of God, the king himself, alone in soliloquy, suggests that the difference between himself and his subjects is merely “ceremony,” “general ceremony,” and, even more telling, “idol ceremony” (4.1.247–8). There is play here between “idol” and “idle,” which, as James Kearney has shown, have interchanging and overlapping connotations in Elizabethan religious rhetoric.41 Both “ceremony” and “idol” were used by Protestants to critique the empty ritual of Catholics, and are key words in the margins of the Geneva Bible, as in a note in 2 Kings 6 on the wearing of penitential sackcloth: “Thus hypocrites, when they fele Gods judgments, thinke to please him with outward ceremonies”; or a note on burnt offerings in Mark 12:33: “He meaneth all the ceremonies of Law, wherein the hypocrites put great holiness.”42 “Idol” and “idolatry” pervade the text and biblical paratext with notes that draw the Old Testament warnings against false worship into a polemically Protestant framework. In this anachronistically medieval context, Henry’s intensive phrasing uses both terms to suggest that the doctrine of divine ordination – the special aura around kings – is “idol ceremony” or false idolatry.

Political Theology: A Question of Terminology This short story of Shakespeare’s use of biblical allusion fits into a larger narrative about the theology of politics – or the politics of theology – in the early modern period. But it also gives us pause, as well as new purchase, on our own use of the term “political theology.” The term has been used in different

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ways in some important work on politics and religion in the field, including the work of Graham Hammill, Victoria Kahn, Julia Reinhard Lupton, and Debora Kuller Shuger, among others.43 The vast differences in the scholarly use of “political theology” stem from the fact that the term was not originally used to describe early modern theology, but as a way of metaphorically understanding the nature of political authority as it emerged, as Kahn writes, either “as a symptom of or resistance to the new secular political order.”44 The combination of words has troubling origins in the philosophy of Carl Schmitt, a German legal professor working at the time of the publication of Politische Theologie (1922) on behalf of the Weimar republic.45 Schmitt uses “political theology” to define a secularizing of theological concepts for the purposes of legitimating sovereignty, especially in urgent actions or “exceptions,” which he describes as “analogous to the miracle in theology.”46 The term was then used quite differently in a late historical work by an exile of Nazi Germany, Ernst Kantorowicz’s The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (1957). Since neither of these writers concerned themselves directly with the history of Protestant politics and theology in sixteenthcentury Europe, the translation of these theories into considerations of Reformation political thought has been both extremely fertile and, at times, confusing. Without always speaking to each other, early modern scholars have fallen roughly into two camps: those who use “political theology” as a categorical term describing Reformation theology as political, and those who use the modern political theories of Schmitt and others as a lens for understanding the use – or misuse – of that conjunction in early modern politics. An example of the first is Shuger’s Political Theologies in Shakespeare’s England (2001), and an example of the second is Kahn’s Future of Illusion: Political Theology and Early Modern Texts (2013). Shuger’s book focuses on early English political thought and belief as largely a branch of Protestant theology.47 Among the central texts in this study is Martin Bucer’s De Regno Christi, written in England in 1550 as a proposal for a Protestant disciplinary state under Edward VI. Works of this sort of political theology more broadly include Tyndale’s Obedience of a Christian Man (1528) – about which Henry VIII reputedly said, “Thys booke ys for me and all kynges to read”48 – and the fourth book of Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion, among other of Calvin’s works which influenced political theologies in the north. Calvin’s experience in Geneva led him toward an idealized relationship between church and secular authority that gave rise to his term “Christian polity” – or politia Christiana.49

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In contrast to the historical use of the term by Shuger, Kahn and others draw from Schmitt’s concept of political theology as emerging from a secular form of political thought that we associate with the late early modern consciousness. In their collection of essays Political Theology and Early Modernity, Julia Reinhard Lupton and Graham Hammill theorize political theology as an event or phenomenon attached to the transition to early modernity: “We take it to name a form of questioning that arises precisely when religion is no longer a dominant explanatory or life mode.”50 Yet this does not mean for them (as it does for Kahn) a shift toward secularism so much as an “entanglement of ostensibly discrete domains – the political and the theological – out of which early modern and modern concepts, forms of government, and views of history are born”; this entanglement is centered on “the use of religious belief to ensure obedience to the state or other kinds of political community.”51 There are period implications to this vision: it is a way of understanding how modernity emerged from the pangs of the separation of the theological and political during this period. The suggestion here, echoing Schmitt, is that religious belief is separate from political modes of understanding, and that it is political exigency that entangles one belief system – a system that subordinates the human to the divine – to another, subordinating the human to the state. These two camps of scholarly inquiry often speak beyond one another – Kahn, for example, suggests that the other camp merely imagines “political theology as divine right”52 – but there is productive value in putting them into dialogue. Part of the difference, of course, has to do with the selection of texts: a book on early modern politics that includes Luther, Tyndale, Calvin, Bucer, and the Bible will produce a vastly different perspective from one omitting them in favor of others. Another concern with the provocative Schmittian conception of political theology is that it is itself inflected by a progressivist interpretation of the Reformation that sees this event as part of the massive shift toward Enlightenment in early modernity.53 As has been argued more strenuously after the term “early modern” had largely replaced “Renaissance,” the Reformation itself was a deeply unmodern event, one that may not even deserve the term “early modern.”54 Tyndale’s concept of the subject’s obedience to a divinely ordained magistrate is arguably stranger to modernity than the medieval forms of political theology described by Kantorowicz, and it is vital that in theorizing this period we do not unintentionally fall back into a Whiggish progressivist narrative about the origins of secularism at the advent of the Reformation. Early political theologies are also constructed by the Bible

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itself, which does not separate the social, theological, and political – as we have done in the post-Enlightenment West.55 Yet in the long working out of the Reformation, and certainly by the time of Milton’s powerful arguments in support of the execution of the king, Tyndale’s and Calvin’s political theologies were no longer sustainable. Somewhere in the course of what we loosely term the “early modern period” – from Reformation to Restoration – the old political theology dies. When and how, then, does the secular sense of political theology emerge? There is no easy answer to this, and certainly not one that can be easily articulated in the short space of a chapter. The point that I have sought to manage here, though, is that a prominent cultural manifestation of this problem – and a way in which English culture worked through it – was biblical interpretation. The questioning, staging, and ironizing of Romans 13 by Shakespeare and his contemporaries suggest that a Reformation conception of political theology is here in the process of erosion.

afterword

Shakespeare’s Biblical Virtues Julia Reinhard Lupton

The Bible on the Shakespearean Stage weds deep learning in the ways of book history, biblical exegesis, and theological controversy to rich interpretive paradigms and a broad theatrical consciousness. It presents powerful ensemble work that allows Shakespeare’s Bible to resound anew. As I read these chapters, I tried to pull out what values or vision for Shakespeare studies and for literary education are furthered by this enterprise. Put compactly, what are Shakespeare’s biblical virtues? That is, what capacities for connection, care, and renewal did Shakespeare glean from his interactions with what Hannibal Hamlin calls “biblical culture,” the matrix of modes and platforms by which Scripture saturated the linguistic, aural, visual, and cognitive worlds of Reformation England?1 Because what concerns me are Shakespeare’s biblical virtues, and not biblical virtues tout court, the values inventoried here should intersect in some way with the longue durée of humanistic pedagogy and the work of the theater, moving beyond any single confession or doctrinal reading to delimit larger circles of concern and styles of comportment. As we learn from this volume, Shakespeare’s Bible is readerly, questing, and controversial; concerned with communities of belonging; increasingly conscious of its mixed sources, competing traditions, and alternative futures; actualized in exercise and performance; and intent on sharing forms of affective knowledge derived from trial and trauma. In my reading of the field opened up by this volume, Shakespeare’s biblical virtues include learning, belonging, respect, performance, and wisdom.

The Virtue of Learning Every chapter in this volume concerns, in one way or another, the act and art of reading and the capacities cultivated by the deliberate and thoughtful interpretation of challenging texts – challenging both hermeneutically and in terms of the demands for living placed on the reader. 222

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Learning per se – both the knowledge gained by study and the posture and habits of acquiring knowledge and seeking insight – does not figure among the seven traditional virtues familiar in medieval Christian iconography. In Jewish ethics, however, a good number of the forty-eight recognized middot (virtues, qualities, measures, norms) involve some aspect of learning, including attentive listening (middah sh’miath haozen), studying Torah (middah talmud), quoting one’s sources (middah omer davar beshem omro), and learning in order to teach (middah lomed al manat lelamed).2 Such educational virtues survive in Christianity in the model of Jesus as Rabbi/teacher, in discipleship as padeia, in Augustine’s charitable hermeneutics, and in preaching as a vocation involving the dynamic circuit of speech, attention, and directed reading. The biblical virtues codified by the early rabbis and church fathers drew on the Greco–Roman rhetorical tradition that helped create St. Paul as the consummate builder of churches through speech and writing.3 The Bible on the Shakespearean Stage elaborates learning as virtue in its depiction of the play-going, sermon-consuming citizens of Shakespeare’s London as “active listeners, learners, and critics” in a public sphere shaped by “the responsive capacity of the pulpit.”4 The volume as a whole projects a vision of the humanities whose forms of “performative exegesis” carry this comportment of embodied and responsive interpretation into the context of secular education.5 Whereas religious discourse often enforces dogmatic positions, the contributors to this volume emphasize instead the ambiguity and polysemy of Scripture and the creative ways in which Shakespeare learned from Reformation interpreters and translators to take the linguistic “pregnancy” of Scriptural proof texts as the occasion for poetic invention.6 Several commentators argue that the literal sense championed by Reform interpreters cannot be understood as “the simple absence of the figurative.”7 Kristen Poole shows how “the compression of ‘two thoughts at once’” effected by both punning play and allegorical elaboration “highlighted the mysterious, troubling, or thrilling capacities of language, and the continuous demand of hermeneutical action for listeners and readers.”8 Tom Bishop beautifully reconstructs the “layered encounters” with Scripture that would have begun in childhood through public worship, household prayer, group song, and early literacy, and he invites us to hear the “play of voices” orchestrated by the art of harmonizing the discrepancies among the Gospels practiced by biblical interpreters.9 The Bible on the Shakespearean Stage highlights the difficult arts of listening that remain vital to literary education today, which is called upon more than ever to promote an open

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yet critical attitude toward the “whirling words” that compete for our attention and test our trust.10

The Virtue of Belonging In Reformation England, the biblical virtue of learning is aimed at shaping communities of readers who strive to cohabit a group identity that no longer functions as simply inherited. Both the challenges and the imaginative practices of belonging are explored in Beatrice Groves’s analysis of London as the new Jerusalem. For sixteenth-century Londoners, “the longing to embody the new Jerusalem is a desire for unity, a yearning that a factious country should become one, should be unified as ‘the house of the chosen Israelites’.”11 Attempts to recreate Jerusalem in London through urban mapping and measurement projects and virtual pilgrimage strived to establish aspirational and conciliatory models of citizenship in response to the recurrent violence of civil war and sectarian antagonism as well as the new paradigms of place imperfectly instituted by the Reformation.12 Groves focuses on the history plays as works that seek national reconciliation, but many of Shakespeare’s plays, including the comedies and the romances, are concerned with rebuilding community in the face of conflict, betrayal, and distrust, as dramatized, for example, in the self-consciously biblical setting of Ephesus in The Comedy of Errors. The Pauline itinerary of Pericles, based on maps from printed Bibles, inducts theater goers into a kind of virtual pilgrimage.13 Humanities pedagogy today crafts spaces for the communal elaboration of meaning and knowledge among participants who hail from multiple backgrounds. Such learning communities recall the rabbinic middah to cling or cleave to one’s colleagues (dibuk chaverim). Moreover, humanities research and pedagogy can enlist virtual platforms in the search for evolving cartographies of community, exploring and enacting new place-making techniques in an era of displacement and placelessness.

The Virtue of Respect Inclusion in one community implies nonparticipation in others. Respect for the stranger, whether in the bare form of legal toleration or in the theologically thicker forms of hospitality, is the virtue practiced at the edges of belonging.14 Shakespeare’s age was marked by the splintering of faith communities within Christendom as well as increasing contact with and knowledge of non-Christian peoples and belief systems. Such contacts led

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to the forms of persecution, missionary conversion, and colonial expropriation whose effects shape the modern world, but could also prompt awareness of Christianity’s own historicity and relative place in an interconnected globe. The Jonah story, a recurrent text in this volume, dramatizes the relationship between the Hebrew prophet, the gentile (Noahide) sailors, and Israel’s enemy the Ninevans, placing all of them under God’s mercy. Like Job, Jonah is recognized as a prophet in Islam; Sura 10 of the Qur’an is named after Jonah, and his grave at the Mosque Nabi Yunis near Mosul is a pilgrimage site.15 In this volume, Bruce Gordon lays out the multilingual and international character of Biblical scholarship in the period, in which Christian scholars drew on the Bomberg Rabbinic Bible for knowledge of Jewish interpretation and added Aramaic, Syriac, and Samaritan to Hebrew and Greek as tools for advanced Biblical studies.16 This emerging respect for the range of sources that fed Christianity, as well as for the variety of peoples and practices in the larger world, is tentatively sounded in Othello and The Merchant of Venice (as explored here by Shaina Trapedo), but also resonates in the mixed messianic landscapes of the romances, which emulsify biblical and classical myths and geographies in an attempt to broker what Thomas Betteridge has termed Shakespeare’s postconfessional vision.17 Richard Strier’s remarkable movement between the Hebrew prophet Elijah, the Roman Pygmalion, and Shakespeare’s modern Sicily and Bohemia manifests the biblical virtue of respect thematized in the Jonah story. The compelling image of the ravens feeding Elijah in the wilderness, isolated by Strier as a key to the meaning of The Winter’s Tale, might also be said to figure Strier’s and Shakespeare’s flights among the mountain peaks cast up by different traditions of miracle and metamorphosis. Like the bees in the classical simile of imitatio, Strier’s ravens migrate among different faith landscapes in a manner that leaves their distinctiveness intact. In The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt defines respect as “a regard for the person from the distance which the space of the world puts between us.”18 The worldliness and reflexivity implied by respect both acknowledges differences and asserts a common ground for the real exchange of words and glances. In the humanities classroom, respect is one of a cluster of virtues, including courage, trust, and justice, that support the mapping of pluralism and its discontents in a world of class, race, and religious antagonisms.

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The Virtue of Performance Virtue and performance flow into each other, whether in Aristotle’s emphasis on virtue as habit and praxis, or in the link between virtue and the virtual implicit in ideas of latency and dynamism, or in the figure of the virtuoso as an expert performer of multiple arts and specialized knowledges. The idea of walking the walk, not just talking the talk, itself rooted in the Scriptural ideal of walking in the ways of God (e.g., Psalm 81:13), links virtue to knowledge through action.19 Shaina Trapedo’s analysis of “performative exegesis” brings action and virtue together in an explicitly biblical hermeneutic modality, as “an explication of biblical narrative through theatrical enactment.”20 Both Groves and Hamlin understand biblical typology as a “mode of processing experience”;21 a similar vision animates Tom Bishop’s quest for a “lived Bible” in Shakespearean drama.22 When in Twelfth Night Sir Toby asks facetiously of Sir Andrew, “Is it a world to hide virtues in?” he draws on the Gospel image of the candle and the bushel (Matt. 5:15–16), setting up the play’s exploration of virtue in its dormant, active, and patient states. Toby’s allusion hits the center of the play’s concern with persons who keep their capacities under wraps (Olivia), or who exercise those capacities in a languid and self-involved way (Orsino), or who disguise their identity in order to survive on uncertain shores (Viola). Toby associates virtue with the worlding of the world as well as with its sustenance and repair: “Is it a world to hide virtues in?” That is, how does the world – composed of human artifacts, relationships, and environmental dependencies – come about because of virtue and require virtue for its ongoing maintenance and transmission?

The Virtue of Wisdom We don’t talk much about wisdom in academe these days; it sounds oldfashioned and pretentious, as well as unscholarly and even anti-intellectual. Wisdom does surface as a value, however, for the Renaissance readers of the Bible convened in this book. Bruce Gordon associates “the wisdom of the Word” with the desire for a reformed and unified Book of Knowledge,23 and Shaina Trapedo explores Christianity’s acknowledged debt to “Israel’s wisdom” in The Merchant of Venice.24 Kristen Poole, citing a sixteenthcentury sermon by John King, alludes to wisdom in the context of the Book of Jonah: Indeed, the story of Jonah is singled out as a place of particular semiotic depth; for readers seeking wisdom that is “not to be uttered by the tongue,

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nor to be comprehended by the wisdome of mortal man, I remit you to those chapters. Jerome writeth of the whole booke, Singula in eo verba plena sunt sensibus, Every word of it is very sententious.”25

Wisdom is virtuous knowledge, developed through practice and hence associated with age, but tending toward paradox and double meaning rather than the transparency of truisms. In the case of Jonah, “wisdom” dovetails with wisdom literature: works such as Proverbs, the Song of Songs, Job, and Ecclesiastes that are characterized by concentrated poetic language in response to virtue as question, not given. The Book of Jonah counts among the Prophets, yet its affinity to the Book of Job and hence its kinship with wisdom literature has often been noted. Both are “book[s] of rebellion and protest” that test the existential extremes of creaturely life.26 The brooding depths of wisdom combines dissent and complaint with the affirmation of tradition: the Proverbs are tough little barnacles of advisement, and both Job and Jonah mix archaic folktale with modern poetry. In the vastness of its landscape, its Judeo-pagan tenor, its mingling of ancient story with modern insight, its wise folly, and its courting of existential extremes, King Lear is Shakespeare’s greatest contribution to wisdom literature. I would like to end by returning to Shakespeare and Jonah. Reading the Book of Jonah as a major subtext of Pericles, Hamlin goes beyond surface similarities in order to understand Pericles as a romance of conversion: [Pericles’s] conversion is not to Christianity, or a specific version of it (Protestant or Catholic), but to himself, his family, and the world. The Greek word for conversion used in the Bible (and especially by Paul) is metanoia. While sometimes translated rather polemically in English Bibles as “repentance” (or even more so as poenitentem agite, “do penance,” in the Latin Vulgate), the term means more literally a change of mind.27

Paul’s metanoia translates the Hebrew teshuvah: return or repentance, the act of atonement and the search for forgiveness in relation to both God and neighbor that culminates in the high holy day of Yom Kippur.28 The haftarah or prophetic portion read on Yom Kippur is Sefer Yonah, the Book of Jonah. The text was chosen because the mercy shown by God to the repentant Ninevans is so immediate that the praying congregants can hope for similar grace, but also, more deeply, because Jonah’s flight from God and his temporary dwellings in the belly of the whale and the booth or sukkah outside the city model the physical and emotional wandering of the Jewish people and the travails of the individual in search of renewal. Indeed, I would suggest that while Pericles may be Shakespeare’s

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most obvious Jonah play, we can find traces of the sullen prophet in many other works, including King Lear, Twelfth Night, The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest, all of which involve characters in flight from their proper callings or vocations; great storms suffered at the edges of proper habitation; sublime encounters with creaturely life; temporary dwelling places in shacks, cottages, willow cabins, and leafy shelters; mental illness or its semblance, in the form of depression, dementia, and delusion; and the virtuous action of forgiveness, understood liturgically, dramatically, and psychoanalytically, as a means to recovery. The word “recovery” places us in a region contiguous to matters Biblical and hermeneutic, but no longer solely exegetical or primarily historical. To what extent can Shakespeare’s Bible shed light on the struggles of individuals and families damaged by addiction, mental illness, trauma, incarceration, or abuse? It is easy to imagine that Jonah asleep in the ship’s hold is deadened by depression; that the man preaching end times in the streets of Ninevah is a bit mad; and that his sukkah outside the city is a skidrow shack. In other words, Jonah, like Lear, is a deeply damaged person, and his own recovery is at stake in this tale, as acknowledged and enacted by the Yom Kippur liturgy. The belly of the great fish represents both the horrific space of addiction and the rehab center, both the echo chamber of anxiety and the spiritual exercises that might lead the patient into new modes of relation. Jonah’s powerful and moving prayer of thanksgiving, delivered from inside the great ribbed nave of God’s creature, resounds with the themes of recovery. In Pericles, the whaling chest that encloses Thaisa and the seaside clinic where she is restored to health are recombined and condensed in the floating hospital that at once symbolizes the prince’s catatonia and frames his healing through music, speech, and touch. What Jerome says of Jonah is also true of Pericles: “Singula in eo verba plena sunt sensibus, Every word of it is very sententious.”29 I first began thinking about Shakespeare, the Bible, and recovery when teaching an undergraduate Shakespeare class. At the end of our collective reading of Twelfth Night, King Lear, and The Winter’s Tale, I received a paper on forgiveness by an older student, a recently matriculated veteran who had missed several classes because of his struggle with sobriety, but who managed to pull himself together by the end of the quarter. Comparing Leontes’s psychic progress to that of a twelve-step recovery program, my student noted that many aspects of Leontes’s journey corresponded to modern practice, except that in twelve-step recovery, “forgiving yourself is a big piece of the process,” and he was unsure that Shakespeare had paid sufficient attention to that difficult work. This observation was an

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instance of wisdom: affective knowledge wrought from experience, tempered with reflection, and bearing the marks of both personal trial and collective thought. In that moment, I witnessed how the matter of this volume, namely, the formative and transformative dialogue between Shakespeare and Scripture, itself affords formation and transformation in students and teachers today. Reading Shakespeare in a public university allowed this perceptive and not un-scarred writer/reader to connect two very different parts of his life in a manner that altered my own relationship to the plays. Our interaction recalled another middah: “making one’s master wiser” (machkim et rabo). It is this kind of exercise in learning, conducted by two actors separated by age, gender, class, and status but participating for a few short weeks in the special space of belonging and respect curated by dramatic literature, that I take to be the highest possible outcome of the special subject addressed in this volume – the Bible on Shakespeare’s stage.

Notes

Introduction: Popular Hermeneutics in Shakespeare’s London 1. Nevv Testament of Iesvs Christ, translated faithfvlly into English, out of the authentical Latin (Rheims, 1582); Holie Bible faithfvlly translated into English, ovt of the avthentical Latin (Douai, 1610). On Catholic readers of English Bibles, see for example F. Molekamp, “Using a Collection to Discover Reading Practices: The British Library Geneva Bibles and a History of Their Early Modern Readers,” Electronic British Library Journal 2006, Article 10, 1–13; www.bl.uk/eblj/2006articles/article10.html. 2. H. Hamlin, The Bible in Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 1. 3. See, as examples, D. Kastan, A Will to Believe: Shakespeare and Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); K. Jackson and A. F. Marotti (eds.), Shakespeare and Religion: Early Modern and Postmodern Perspectives (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 2011); D. Loewenstein and M. Witmore (eds.), Shakespeare and Early Modern Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015); S. Beckwith, Shakespeare and the Grammar of Forgiveness (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011); K. Poole, Supernatural Environments in Shakespeare’s England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); A. Shell, Shakespeare and Religion (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2010). In addition to works specifically on Shakespeare, there have also been important related studies, such as P. Happé and W. Hüskin (eds.), Staging Scripture: Biblical Drama 1350–1600 (Leiden: Brill, 2016), which shows the extensive precedent for biblical play in medieval drama, and that much of this drama continued to be staged and written in Elizabethan England. 4. Hamlin, The Bible in Shakespeare, 74. 5. Of the titles listed, Cook and Galey’s volume uses the Bible to explore the role of the material text in constructing cultural authority; Groves’s book explores the interplay between the newer Protestant Biblicism and the liturgical, imagistic, and dramatic structures of Catholic tradition; Streete’s collection

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6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

11.

12.

13. 14.

15. 16.

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pays some attention to Shakespeare, and some to hermeneutics, but is less focused on these interests; Marx is not concerned with the controversies of reading or the interpretive structures of the Reformation and CounterReformation, but focuses instead on imagery and narrative, drawing close connections between the order of the First Folio and the biblical narrative. Hamlin, The Bible in Shakespeare; T. Cook and A. Galey (eds.), Shakespeare, the Bible, and the Form of the Book: Contested Scripture (London: Routledge, 2014); B. Groves, Texts and Traditions: Religion in Shakespeare 1592–1604 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); A. Streete (ed.), Early Modern Drama and the Bible: Contexts and Readings 1570–1625 (New York: Palgrave, 2012); and S. Marx, Shakespeare and the Bible (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). A. Hunt, The Art of Hearing: English Preachers and Their Audiences, 1590–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). N. Shaheen, Biblical References in Shakespeare’s Plays (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1999), 38–48. John King, Lectures vpon Ionas deliuered at Yorke in the yeare of our Lorde 1594 (Oxford, 1599), 78. The Bible and Holy Scriptures (Geneva, 1560), sig. 3*2r. On Edward as a “second Josiah,” see for example Thomas Cranmer, The Miscellaneous Writings and Letters of Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, ed. J. E. Cox (Cambridge: The Parker Society, 1846), 127. For further examples and discussion, see T. Fulton, “Toward a New Cultural History of the Geneva Bible,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 47.3 (2017): 487-516. The Sermon is titled “A Model of Christian Charity,” D. McQuade, et al., The Harper Single Volume American Literature, 3rd edn. (New York: Pearson, 1998), 92–4. On Angelo, see T. Fulton, “Shakespeare’s Everyman: Measure for Measure and English Fundamentalism,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 40.1 (2010): 119–47; on Malvolio, see D. Bevington, “The Debate about Shakespeare and Religion,” in Loewenstein and Witmore, eds., Shakespeare and Early Modern Religion, 25–8. A. Gurr, Playgoing in Shakespare’s London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 18–22. Laurence Barker, Christs Checke to S. Peter for his curious question, out of those words in Saint Iohn: Quid ad te? . . . In sixe seueral sermons (London, 1599), sig. M8r. Barker, Christs Checke, sig. M8v. Barker, Christs Checke, sig. M5v.

232 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40.

41.

Notes to Pages 6–11 Barker, Christs Checke, sig. M5v. Barker, Christs Checke, sig. M7v–M8r. Barker, Christs Checke, sig. F7r. See Hunt, The Art of Hearing. George Gyfford, Sermons vpon the whole booke of the Reuelation (London, 1599), sig. A3v. See K. Poole, “Religion and Theatre,” in The Cambridge Guide to the Worlds of Shakespeare, ed. B. Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 690–7. Barker, Christs Checke, sig. H6r. Gyfford, Sermons, sig. B5r. Barker, Christs Checke, sig. M5v. John Dove, A sermon [on Ezekiel xxxiii. 11] preached at Paules Crosse, the sixt of February, 1596 (London, 1597), 18. Gervase Babington, A Sermon Preached at Paules Crosse the Second Sunday in Mychaelmas tearme last. 1590 (London, 1591), sig. B3r. Babington, A Sermon Preached at Paules Crosse, sig. B7. King, Lectures upon Jonas, 16. John Howson, A second sermon preached at Paules Crosse, the 21 of May, 1598, vpon the 21 of Math. The 12. and 13. Verses (London, 1598), 47. Bible (Geneva, 1560), fol. 121. Dove, A sermon, 52. Dove, A sermon, 52. Dove, A sermon, 52, 53, 53. John Bradford, Two Notable Sermons . . . the one of Repentance, the other of the Lord’s supper (London, 1599), sigs. G8v–Hr. Edward Topsell, Times lamentation: or An exposition on the prophet Ioel, in sundry sermons or meditations (London, 1599), 6. BL shelfmark 3165.c.18. Topsell, Times, 25. Topsell, Times, 9, 7. Henry Smith, Foure Sermons Preached by Master Henry Smith (London, 1599), sig. I2r. P. Stallybrass, “Books and Scrolls: Navigating the Bible,” in J. Andersen and E. Sauer (eds.), Books and Readers in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 61–3. B. Crockett, The Play of Paradox: Stage and Sermon in Renaissance England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995); J. Knapp, Shakespeare’s Tribe: Church, Nation, and Theater in Renaissance England (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2002).

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1 The Bible in Transition in the Age of Shakespeare: A European Perspective 1. A crucial work is A. Moss, Renaissance Truth and the Latin Language Turn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 1–12. 2. L. E. Berry, “Introduction,” in The Geneva Bible: A Facsimile of the 1560 Edition (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969). 3. A. Pettegree, The Book in the Renaissance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011). 4. Novvm instrumentum omne, diligenter ab Erasmo Roterodamo recognitum & emendatum: non solum ad Graecam ueritatem, uerumetiam ad multorum utrisque linguae codicum, eorumque ueterum simul & emendatorum fidem, postremo ad probatissimorum autorum citationem, emendationem & interpretationem ... Basileae: In aedibus Ioannis Frobenij, ... 1516. See C. Christvon Wedel, Erasmus of Rotterdam: Advocate of a New Christianity (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013), 79–96. 5. See the important book by J. Krans, Beyond What is Written: Erasmus and Beza as Conjectural Critics of the New Testament (Leiden: Brill, 2006). For a background on Greek in early modern Europe, see P. Botley, “Learning Greek in Western Europe, 1396–1516,” in C. Holmes and J. Waring (eds.), Literacy, Education and Manuscript Transmission in Byzantium and Beyond (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 199–223. 6. H. Jan de Jonge, “Novum Testamentum a nobis versum: The Essence of Erasmus’ Edition of the New Testament,” Journal of Theological Studies 35 (1984): 394–413. On Erasmus’s method of translation, see P. Botley, Latin Translation in the Renaissance: The Theory and Practice of Leonardo Bruni, Giannozzo Manetti, and Desiderius Erasmus (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 2004). 7. On Erasmus and the corruption of the Vulgate, see Krans, Beyond What is Written, 89–90. Also, R. Coogan, Erasmus, Lee and the Correction of the Vulgate: The Shaking of the Foundations (Geneva: Droz, 1992). 8. S. G. Burnett, Christian Hebraism in the Reformation Era (1500–1660): Authors, Books, and the Transmission of Jewish Learning (Leiden: Brill, 2012); see the essays in the collection and catalog, Christian Hebraism: The Study of Jewish Culture by Christian Scholars in Medieval and Early Modern Times (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Library, 1988). 9. For biographies of Erasmus’s circle, see P.G. Bietenholz and T. B. Deutscher, Contemporaries of Erasmus: A Biographical Register of the Renaissance and Reformation, 3 vols. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985–7). 10. J. H. Bentley, “Biblical Philology and Christian Humanism: Lorenzo Valla and Erasmus as Scholars of the Gospels,” Sixteenth Century Journal 8.2 (1977): 8–28; P. Brandt, “Manuscrits grecs utilisés par

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11. 12.

13.

14. 15.

16.

17. 18.

19.

20.

Notes to Pages 19–20 Erasme pour son édition du Novum Instrumentum de 1516,” Theologische Zeitschrift 54.2 (1998): 120–4. Krans, Beyond What is Written, 190–1. The essential work remains J. H. Bentley, Humanists and Holy Writ: New Testament Scholarship in the Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012). C. Augustijn, “The Sixteenth-Century Reformers and the Bible,” in W. Beuken, S. Freyne, and A. Weiler (eds.), The Bible and its Readers (London: SCM Press, 1991), 56–68. C. M. Furey, Erasmus, Contarini, and the Religious Republic of Letters (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 2006). L. Voet, The Plantin Press (1555–1589): A Bibliography of the Works Printed and Published by Christopher Plantin at Antwerp and Leiden (Amsterdam: Van Hoeve, 1980–1983); R. Hála, Christoph Plantin; aus der Blütezeit des Buchdruckes in Antwerpen (Vienna: Herbert Reichner Verlag, 1936); K. Lee Bowen, Christopher Plantin and Engraved Book Illustrations in SixteenthCentury Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); C. Colin, Christopher Plantin (London: Cassell & Company, 1960); F. de Nave, Cristobal Plantino (1520–1589): impresor del humanismo y de las ciencias (Madrid: Direcció n General del Libro y Bibliotecas, Ministerio de Cultura, 1990). E. Cameron, “The Luther Bible,” in E. Cameron (ed.), The New Cambridge History of the Bible: From 1450 to 1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 217–38 (abbreviated hereafter as NCHB). Also, J. Flood, “Martin Luther’s Bible Translation in Its German and European Contexts,” in R. Griffiths (ed.), The Bible in the Renaissance: Essays on Biblical Commentary and Translation in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), 45–70. P. Arblaster, G. Juhá sz, and G. Latré (eds.), Tyndale’s Testament (Turnhout: Brepols, 2002). Iesv Christi D.N. Nouum testamentum: siue fœdus, Græcè & Latinè / Theodoro Beza interprete ... Excudebat Henricus Stephanus, illustris viri Huldrichi Fuggeri typographus, 1565. J-P. Delville, “L’évolution des vulgates et la composition de nouvelles versions latines de la Bible au xvie siècle,” in M-C. Gomez-Géraud (ed.), Biblia: les Bibles en latin au temps des Réformes (Paris: Presses de l’Université ParisSorbonne, 2008). Biblia Sacra hebraice, chaldaice, graece, & latine, Philippi II. reg. cathol. pietate et stvdio ad sacrosanctae ecclesiae vsvm. Christoph. Plantinvs excvd. Antverpiae, 1569–1572. See Z. Shalev, Sacred Words and Worlds: Geography, Religion, and Scholarship, 1550–1700 (Leiden: Brill, 2012).

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21. See the essays in A. P. Coudert and J. S. Shoulson (eds.), Hebraica vertitas?: Christian Hebraists and the Study of Judaism in Early Modern Europe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004); A. Grafton, A. Shelford, and N. Siraisi, New Worlds, Ancient Texts (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992). 22. M. O’Connor, Cajetan’s Biblical Commentaries (Leiden: Brill, 2017). 23. I. Zinberg, Italian Jewry in the Reniassance Era (New York: Ktav Publishing House, 1974), 46. 24. W. J. Bouwsma, Concordia Mundi: The Career and Thought of Guillaume Postel (1510–1581) (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957). 25. A. Grafton and J. Weinberg, “I Have Always Loved the Holy Tongue”: Isaac Casaubon, The Jews, and a Forgotten Chapter in Renaissance Scholarship (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 96. 26. R. T. Anderson and T. Giles, The Samaritan Pentateuch: An Introduction to its Origin, History, and Significance for Biblical Studies (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2012). 27. S. Mandelbrote, “The Old Testament and Its Ancient Versions in Manuscript and Print in the West, from c. 1480 to c. 1780,” in Cameron, NCHB, 104. 28. S. G. Burnett, From Christian Hebraism to Jewish Studies: Johannes Buxtorf (1564–1629) and Hebrew Learning in the Seventeenth Century (Leiden: Brill, 1996); and A. Grafton, Joseph Scaliger: A Study in the History of Classical Scholarship, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983–1993). 29. A. Hamilton, “The Study of Tongues: The Semitic Languages and the Bible in the Renaissance,” in Cameron, NCHB, 23. See also, A. Hamilton, “Scaliger the Orientalist,” in A. Vrolijk and K. van Ommen (eds.), “All My Books in Foreign Tongues”: Scaliger’s Oriental Legacy in Leiden (Leiden University Library, 2009), 10–17. 30. M. H. Goshen-Gottstein, “Foundations of Biblical Philology in the Seventeenth Century: Christian and Jewish Dimensions,” in I. Twersky and B. Septimus (eds.), Jewish Thought in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 77–94. 31. Hamilton, “The Study of Tongues,” 24. 32. Hamilton, “The Study of Tongues,” 27. 33. S. P. Brock, “The Development of Syriac Studies,” in K. J. Cathcart (ed.), The Edward Hincks Bicentenary Lectures (Dublin: University College, 1994), 94–113. 34. Hamilton, “The Study of Tongues,” 27. 35. R. Wilkinson, “Immanuel Tremellius’ 1569 Edition of the Syriac New Testament,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 58.1 (2007): 9–25. On Tremellius,

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38. 39. 40.

41.

42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47.

48.

Notes to Pages 23–26 see K. Austin, From Judaism to Calvinism: The Life and Writings of Immanuel Tremellius (c. 1510–1580) (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007). Hamilton, “The Study of Tongues,” 31. A. Hamilton, “Arabic Studies in Europe,” in Encyclopedia of Arabic Language and Linguistics, vol. 1, ed. Kees Versteegh (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 166–72. A. Hamilton, Arab Culture and Ottoman Magnificence in Antwerp’s Golden Age (London: Arcadian Library; Oxford; New York: In association with Oxford University Press, 2002); R. Wilkinson, The Kabbalistic Scholars of the Antwerp Polyglot Bible (Leiden: Brill, 2007). Hamilton, “The Study of Tongues,” 31. A. Hamilton, William Bedwell the Arabist 1563–1632 (Leiden: Brill, 1985). A. Hamilton, “In Search of the Most Perfect Text: The Early Modern Printed Polyglot Bibles from Alcalá (1510–1520) to Brian Walton (1654–1658),” in Cameron, NCHB, 143. On Pagninus, see A. M. Guerra, “Santi Pagnini tradacteur de la Bible,” in I. Backus and F. Higman (eds.), Théorie et pratique de l’exégèse: actes du troisième colloque international sur l’histoire de l’exégèse biblique au XVIe siècle (Geneva: Droz, 1990), 191–8. D. Aranoff, “Elijah Levita: A Jewish Hebraist,” Jewish History 23.1 (2009): 17–40. A. Hamilton, “In Search of the Most Perfect Text,” Cameron, NCHB, 145. Together with Matthew McLean of St. Andrews University, I am currently completing a book on the Protestant Latin Bibles of the sixteenth century. B. Gordon and E. Cameron, “Latin Bibles in the Early Modern Period,” Cameron, NCHB, 187–216. On Estienne, see E. Armstrong, Robert Estienne, Royal Printer: An Historical Study of the Elder Stephanus (Abington: Sutton Courtnay Press, 1986). Mikdash yeyai [i.e. adonai], ʻesrim ve-ʾarbʻa sefare ha-mikhtav ha-ḳ adosh “= En tibi lector Hebraica Biblia Latina planeque noua Sebast. Munsteri tralatione, post omneis omnium hactenus ubiuis gentium aeditiones euulgata, & quoad fieri potuit, hebraicae ueritati conformata: adiectis insuper è Rabinorum commentarijs annotationibus haud poenitendis, pulchre & uoces ambiguas & obscuriora quaeque elucidantibus ... Basileae: Ex officina Bebeliana, impendiis Michaelis Isingrinii et Henrici Petri, 1534–1535. See K. H. Burmeister, Sebastian Münster: Versuch eines biographischen Gesamtbildes (Basel, Stuttgart: Helbing & Lichtenhahn, 1969); M. McLean, “Between Basel and Zurich: Humanist Rivalries and the Works of Sebastian Munster,” in M. Walsby and G. Kemp (eds.), The Book Triumphant: Print in Transition in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 270–91. M. Engammare, “Johannes Calvinus trium linguarum peritus? La question de l’Hébreu,” Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance 58.1 (1996): 35–60.

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49. C. Gantet, “La Religion et ses mots: la Bible latine de Zurich (1543) entre la tradition et l’innovation,” Zwingliana 23 (1996): 143–67. 50. B. Gordon, “Remembering Jerome and Forgetting Zwingli: The Zurich Latin Bible of 1543 and the Establishment of Heinrich Bullinger’s Church,” Zwingliana 41 (2014): 1–33. 51. On Castellio’s life, see H. R. Guggisberg, Sebastian Castello 1515–1563: Humanist and Defender of Religious Toleration in a Confessional Age, ed. and trans. B. Gordon (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003). 52. I. Backus, “Moses, Plato and Flavius Josephus: Castellio’s Conceptions of Sacred and Profane in His Latin Versions of the Bible,” in B. Gordon and M. McLean (eds.), Shaping the Bible in the Reformation (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 143–65. 53. On Jerome and translation, see J. Rebenich, “Jerome: The ‘Vir trilinguis’ and the ‘Hebraica veritas’,” Vigiliae christianae 47 (1993): 50–77; A. Cain, The Letters of Jerome: Asceticism, Biblical Exegesis, and the Construction of Christian Authority in Late Antiquity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); M. Graves, Jerome’s Hebrew Philology: A Study Based on His Commentary on Jeremiah (Leiden: Brill, 2007); M. Hale Williams, The Monk and the Book: Jerome and the Making of Christian Scholarship (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). 54. See H. H. Glunt, History of the Vulgate in England from Alcuin to Roger Bacon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), and W. S. Allen, Translating for King James (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1969). 55. E. F. Rice, St. Jerome in the Renaissance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1985). 56. See J. Eskult, “Translations in the Protestant Reformation: Historical Contexts, Philological Justification, and the Impact of Classical Rhetoric on the Conception of Translation Methods,” in B. Gordon and M. McLean, Shaping the Bible in the Reformation: Books, Scholars and Their Readers in the Sixteenth Century (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 167–85. 57. See U. Leu, “The Book- and Reading-Culture in Basle and Zurich during the Sixteenth Century,” in Walsby and Kemp (eds.), The Book Triumphant, 295–319. 58. Gordon and Cameron, “Latin Bibles in the Early Modern Period,” in Cameron, NCHB, 190. See also B. Gordon, “Teaching the Church: The Protestant Latin Bibles and their Readers,” in J. Powell McNutt and D. Lauber (eds.), The People’s Book: The Reformation and the Bible (Westmont: InterVarsity Press, 2017), 1–29. 59. Gordon and Cameron, “Latin Bibles,” in Cameron, NCHB, 192. 60. Gordon and Cameron, “Latin Bibles,” in Cameron, NCHB, 200.

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Notes to Pages 29–33

61. F. Molekamp, “Genevan Legacies: The Making of the English Geneva Bible,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Bible in Early Modern England, c. 1530–1700, eds. K. Killeen, H. Smith, and R. Willie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 38–53. 62. J. Walden, “Global Calvinism: The Maps in the English Geneva Bible,” in Gordon and McLean, Shaping the Bible, 187–215. 63. I. Backus, The Reformed Roots of the English New Testament: The Influence of Theodore Beza on the English New Testament (Pittsburgh: The Pickwick Press, 1980). 64. M. S. Betteridge, “The Bitter Notes: The Geneva Bible and Its Annotations,” Sixteenth Century Journal 14.1 (1983): 41–62. 65. C. Gribben, “Deconstructing the Geneva Bible: The Search for a Puritan Poetic,” Literature and Theology 14.1 (2000): 1–16. 66. P. J. O’Banion, “The Pastoral Use of the Book of Revelation in Late-Tudor England,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 57.4 (2006): 693–710. 67. T. M. McCoog, “Martin, Gregory (1542? –1582),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). 68. On the controversial character of the Geneva notes, see T. Furniss, “Reading the English Bible: Notes toward an English Revolution?” Prose Studies: History, Theory, Criticism 31.1 (2009): 1–21. 69. Cited in D. Norton, “English Bibles from c. 1520 to c. 1750,” in Cameron, NCHB, 329. 70. Norton, “English Bibles from c. 1520 to c. 1750,” in Cameron, NCHB, 332. 71. Norton, “English Bibles from c. 1520 to c. 1750,” in Cameron, NCHB, 333. 72. Norton, “English Bibles from c. 1520 to c. 1750,” in Cameron, NCHB, 334. 73. Norton, “English Bibles from c. 1520 to c. 1750,” in Cameron, NCHB, 335. 74. J. Bernier, La Critique du Pentateuque de Hobbes à Calmet (Paris: Champion, 2010); T. L. Frampton, Spinoza and the Rise of Historical Criticism of the Bible (New York: T&T Clark, 2006). 75. William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, in Stephen Greenblatt, et al. (eds.), The Norton Shakespeare, 3rd edn. (New York: Norton, 2016), 1.3.91–2.

2 The Trouble with Translation: Paratexts and England’s Bestselling New Testament 1. W. Dunn Macray, Annals of the Bodleian Library, Oxford (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1890), 315. In the first edition of the Annals (1868), Macray erroneously reports that the Denyer collection also includes a 1535 Coverdale. 2. Biblia The Byble (Southwark: James Nicholson, 1537; STC 2064), sig. **4r. Bodleian shelfmark Denyer Bib. Eng. e.1537.

Notes to Pages 33–35

239

3. The byble in Englyshe (London: Edward Whitchurch, 1540; STC 2070), sigs. *1r and ✠1r. 4. The byble (London: John Day, 1551; STC 2088), sigs. *1r and *4v; Bodleian shelfmark Denyer Bib. Eng. d.1551. 5. The newe testament ([London?: Thomas Godfray?], 1536; STC 2831), sig. A1r; Bodleian shelfmark Denyer N. T. Eng. d.1536. And The newe testament (Antwerp: [Crom? or Widow of Ruremond?], 1536; STC 2833 or 2834); Bodleian shelfmark Denyer N. T. Eng. e.1536. 6. The newe testament both Latine and Englyshe (Southwark: James Nicholson, 1538; STC 2816.7), sig. ✠1r; Bodleian shelfmark Denyer N. T. Lat.-Eng. e.1538; and The newe testament in Englyshe (London: Richard Grafton and Edward Whitchurch, 1540; STC 2846), sig. *1r; Bodleian shelfmark Denyer N. T. Eng. d.1540. 7. A. S. Herbert, T. H. Darlow, and H. S. Moule (eds.), Historical Catalogue of Printed Editions of the English Bible, 1525–1961. New York: American Bible Society, 1968; A. W. Pollard, G. R. Redgrave, W. A. Jackson, F. S. Ferguson, and K. F. Pantzer (eds.), A Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, and Ireland and of English Books Printed Abroad, 1475–1640, 2nd ed., 3 vols. (London: Bibliographical Society, 1976–91). 8. STC 2088. 9. The nature of the “Hollybushe” attribution is unclear. The dual-language edition that names him had first been issued with a title page that names Coverdale as the translator. This title page was then canceled by a new one, the one that names Hollybush. The first Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (1885–1900) says that Nicholson removed Coverdale’s name from the title page and replaced it with “Hollybushe” because Coverdale had complained about the poor quality of Nicholson’s text. J. F. Mozley, Coverdale and His Bibles (London: Lutterworth Press, 1953), 188, writes that the name may be a pseudonym used by one of Nicholson’s associates, and Herbert cites him. Another possibility is one that we see in a 1992 auction description from Christie’s: it describes John Hollybush as a “pseudonym” of Coverdale. See Lot 31 of Sale 4883 which the auction house held on December 18 of that year. The book sold on that occasion was An exposicion upon the song of the blessed virgin Mary, called Magnificat (Southwark: James Nicholson, 1538; STC 16979.7), another work by Coverdale. The auction catalog is archived on the Christie’s website: www .christies.com/salelanding/index.aspx?intsaleid=15419. 10. A. W. Pollard (ed.), Records of the English Bible (London: Henry Frowde, 1911), 293–94. 11. Calendar of Patent Rolls, Edward VI. Vol III: 1549–1551 (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1939), 227; and P. W. M. Blayney, The Stationers’ Company

240

12.

13. 14.

15. 16.

17. 18.

19. 20. 21. 22.

23.

Notes to Pages 36–38 and the Printers of London, 1501–1557, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), II:732. The patent justifies Jugge’s control of New Testaments by arguing that “printing by strangers [i.e. foreigners] has led to errors of translation as well as in the words and orthography.” Calendar of Patent Rolls. Elizabeth I. Vol I: 1558–1560 (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1939), 92–3. At that date, the patent included “statue books, libels of acts of Parliament, proclamations, injunctions and service books and other volumes printed by authority of Parliament, in English or English and another tongue mixed (except Latin grammars).” The newe testament (London: Richard Jugge, [1561?]; STC 2872), sig. &&4v. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography attributes the grievance and resolution discussed in this paragraph to Jugge’s inability “to produce religious texts at a satisfactory rate” in the wake of Cawood’s death (H. R. Tedder, “Jugge, Richard (c.1514–1577),” rev. J. Boro, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/15160). This period, however, was one that saw broad grievances against patent-based monopolies, so it is unlikely that the stationers who petitioned against Jugge were motivated by a desire to provide readers with enough books. Because there is no direct evidence, it is only speculation to suggest that Jugge’s rate of production was what tipped the High Commission’s favor toward the other stationers. Pollard, Records of the English Bible, 313–18. E. Arber (ed.), A Transcript of the Registers of the Company of Stationers of London, 1554–1640 AD, 5 vols. (London and Birmingham: Privately Printed, 1875–94), I:115. Calendar of Patent Rolls. Elizabeth I. Vol. VII: 1575–1578 (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1982), 333–4. Pollard, Records of the English Bible, 318–9. In 1561, John Bodley (father of Thomas Bodley) had secured a patent to print Geneva Bibles and, in 1566, Matthew Parker and Edmund Grindal wrote to William Cecil supporting the patent’s renewal. Arber, Transcript of the Registers of the Company of Stationers, II:786–7. See STC 2879.4, 2879.6, and 2879.8. None bear dates, but the STC estimates that these – especially the first – may have been printed in 1578. Barker replaced Jugge’s black-letter sixteenmos with a line of roman-letter ones marketed under the name of Theodore Beza. As discussed in the next section, survival of these books – both the octavo and the sixteenmo New Testaments – is quite poor, so it would not be surprising if some had been issued and are now lost. Dawson was bound to Jugge on August 24, 1559 and freed on February 28, 1568 (Arber, Transcript of the Registers of the Company of Stationers, I:120 and I:366).

Notes to Pages 38–39

241

24. The first Jugge octavo (STC 2870) is undated, but the almanac it includes begins in 1553, making that the likely date of publication. Jugge initially issued the version in quarto, probably in 1552 (STC 2876), with additional editions around 1553 (and 2869) and 1566 (STC 2873). He also issued his first sixteenmo edition in or around 1552 (STC 2868). On the messy issue of Norton and Bill’s relationship to Robert Barker and the office of Royal Printer, see G. Rees and M. Wakely, Publishing, Politics, and Culture: The King’s Printers in the Reign of James I and VI (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 25. From 1579 to 1615, the STC documents thirty-six editions of the black-letter Geneva quarto, a markedly different book than the 1560 debut of the translation. The count of thirty-three increases to thirty-six if we also include the three quartos that Jugge published. 26. A Note of the seuerall sorts of Bookes in the Ware-houses ([London: Bonham Norton and John Bill, c.1624]; STC 7705). Reproduced in Rees and Wakely, Publishing, Politics, and Culture, 171, and discussed, 167–89. 27. Like many small-format New Testaments, this edition (STC 2918.7) is recorded in only a single, imperfect, copy. The stock may also have included copies of some other editions published earlier in the teens. According to the STC, some copies appear to mix sheets from multiple editions (see the STC’s notes to 2912 and 2916), perhaps suggesting that the warehouse was mixing its stock. 28. A Stationers’ Company decision from 1635 singles out “Cheekes Testament” (a label discussed later in this section) as the only Bible or New Testament that could be printed in editions of as many as 6,000 copies. At that date, most books were limited to 2,000 copies at the high end, with those in very small type capping out at 3,000 or 5,000 (Arber, Transcript of the Registers of the Company of Stationers, IV:22). (The Company imposed print-run limits to keep typesetters consistently employed; if type could be left standing indefinitely, compositors might lose work.) A discussion of the Bible monopoly from 1641 does not mention the black-letter octavo New Testaments, but it does suggest that the black-letter Geneva quartos of the past had been printed in runs of 3,000 copies (Matthew Sparke, Scintilla, or a light broken into dark Warehouses (London, 1641; Wing S4818B), sigs. A2v–A3r. 29. Blayney, The Stationers’ Company and the Printers of London, II:732–3. 30. W. A. Jackson (ed.), Records of the Court of the Stationers’ Company 1602 to 1640 (London: The Bibliographical Society, 1957), 20. Robert Barker at this time was the King’s Printer, and, as Jackson writes, “So far as can be seen Dawson’s rights were based merely on the fact that he had for several decades printed the 8° N. T. as deputy of Barker” (20 n.1).

242

Notes to Pages 39–45

31. Information about Cheke comes from A. Bryson, “Cheke, Sir John (1514–1557),” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/5211. 32. Blayney, The Stationers’ Company and the Printers of London, II:733. 33. The newe Testamente (London: Richard Jugge, [1553]; STC 2870), sig. π2v. Cheke’s specific proposals for spelling reform were more radical than what we find in the Tyndale–Jugge text, but he nonetheless may have made efforts to provide Jugge with a regular text. Further research on the connection between the Tyndale–Jugge revisions and Cheke is needed. 34. See the entries for STC 2867 and 2887.7 in R. Lubrosky and E. Ingram (eds.), A Guide to English Illustrated Books 1536–1603 (Tempe: Medieval and Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1999). 35. See, for example, STC 2906 (1608). 36. The earliest edition prints a copy of Jugge’s patent to publish the New Testament and a dedicatory epistle to Edward before the calendar. 37. The newe Testamente (London: Richard Jugge, [1553]; STC 2870), sig. ✠1v. 38. The Newe Testament (London: Christopher Barker, [1579]; STC 2880.5), sig. *1r. 39. STC 2870, sig. ✠✠✠6r. 40. STC 2880.5, sig. *8v. 41. STC 2870, sigs. Zz8r and &&3r. 42. As best as I can determine, this is the only one of the octavo paratexts that derives from Bishops’. Notably, it was introduced by Barker, not when Jugge first replaced Tyndale’s translation with the Bishops’ text. 43. STC 2880.5, sig. *2v. 44. On the quarto editions, see n.24. 45. Only one sixteenmo with the Bishops’ text survives: STC 2875a (c.1575). 46. Pollard, Records of the English Bible, 297. 47. On the nature of notes written for the Bishops’ translation, see M. S. Betteridge, “The Bitter Notes: The Geneva Bible and Its Annotations,” The Sixteenth-Century Journal 14.1 (1983): 41–62, esp. 54. The Bishops’ Bible was not especially successful in quarto after Barker began printing Geneva Bibles in that format in 1579. Barker printed his only Bishops’ quarto in 1584 (STC 2142). 48. Betteridge, “The Bitter Notes,” 56. Betteridge describes the notes as “Tyndale’s” because they first appear in editions that print a revision of Tyndale’s New Testament, but, as this chapter has tried to make clear, they postdate Tyndale’s death and appear to have no direct association with him. 49. Though Betteridge, “The Bitter Notes,” 56, quotes from the 1608 edition (STC 2906), I quote from Jugge’s 1553 edition (STC 2879), sig. Y6v. The Tyndale–Jugge editions, which date before the Geneva introduced

Notes to Pages 45–52

50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61.

62. 63.

243

verse numbers to English Bibles, use a system of letters – A, B, C, D, etc. – to divide each chapter into sections. Editions with the Bishops’ text retain this system while adding in the familiar set of verse numbers. William Barlow, The Summe and Substance of the Conference (London: Matthew Law, 1604; STC 1456.5), sig. G4v. STC 2870, sig. D8r. See, for example, the notes to Matthew 3:1 and Mark 16:16. John 16:7, Luke 17:9, and Ephesians 1:5, for example. STC 2870, sig. Ff8v. STC 2870, sig. Zz2r. STC 2870, sig. Ll7r. STC 2870, sig. Qq7v. The Bible and Holy Scriptures (Geneva: Rowland Hall, 1560; STC 2093), sig. CCc3v. STC 2870, sigs. Rr4r–v. The holy Byble (London: Richard Jugge, 1575; STC 2114). D. Kastan, A Will to Believe: Shakespeare and Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 32–5 and N. Shaheen, Biblical References in Shakespeare’s Plays (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 1989). Kastan, A Will to Believe, 34. Shaheen, Biblical References in Shakespeare’s Plays, 22–5.

3 John 6, Measure for Measure, and the Complexities of the Literal Sense 1. William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure, The Arden Shakespeare, Second Series, ed. J.W. Lever (London: Thomson, 1965, rpt. 2006), 2.4.1–7. All quotations are from this edition and will be cited parenthetically hereafter. 2. For histories of Eucharistic controversy, see L. Wandel, The Eucharist in the Reformation: Incarnation and Liturgy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) and G. Macy, The Banquet’s Wisdom: A Short History of the Theologies of the Lord’s Supper (Collegeville: OSL Publications, 2005). 3. John 6:35, 56. The Bible. Translated according to the Hebrew and Greeke, and conferred with the best translations in diuers languages (London, 1578), sig. Gg viv. Unless otherwise indicated, references are to the 1578 edition and are cited parenthetically in text. N. Shaheen, Biblical References in Shakespeare’s Plays (Newark University of Delaware Press, 1999), 256, does not include John 6 in his account of these lines, though he cites other (more indirect) allusions to Matthew 15:8, Mark 7:6 and Isaiah 29:13. Shaheen records one Shakespearean allusion to John 6:63, in 2 Henry 4 (442–4).

244

Notes to Pages 52–54

4. Three exceptions include S. Greenblatt, “Remnants of the Sacred,” in M. de Grazia, A. Jones, and P. Stallybrass (eds.), Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 337–45; T. Rosendale, Liturgy and Literature in the Making of Renaissance England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); and J. Zysk, Shadow and Substance: Eucharistic Controversy and English Drama across the Reformation Divide (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2017). For studies of Eucharistic theology and early modern representation outside a dramatic context, see W. J. T. Kirby, Persuasion and Conversion: Religion, Politics, and the Public Sphere (Leiden: Brill, 2013). K. Johnson, Made Flesh: Sacrament and Poetics in Post-Reformation England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014); J. Anderson, Translating Investments (New York: Fordham University Press, 2000); and S. Read, Eucharist and Poetic Imagination in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 5. For representative work on religion in the play see D. Shuger, Political Theologies in Shakespeare’s England: The Sacred and the State in Measure for Measure (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001); S. Beckwith, Shakespeare and the Grammar of Forgiveness (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011), 59–81; T. Fulton, “Shakespeare’s Everyman: Measure for Measure and English Fundamentalism,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 40.1 (2010): 119–47; J. Rust, The Body in Mystery: The Political Theology of the Corpus Mysticum in the Literature of Post-Reformation England (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2014), 103–37; P. Lake and M. Questier, The Antichrist’s Lewd Hat: Protestants, Papists, and Players in Post-Reformation England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 621–700; J. Reinhard Lupton, Afterlives of the Saints: Hagiography, Typology, and Renaissance Literature (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1996), 110–40; and H. Diehl, “‘Infinite Space’: Representation and Reformation in Measure for Measure,” Shakespeare Quarterly 49 (1998): 393–410. 6. G. K. Hunter, “Six Notes on Measure for Measure,” Shakespeare Quarterly 15.3 (1964): 170. 7. Fulton, “Shakespeare’s Everyman,” 120. 8. H. Hamlin, The Bible in Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 42. 9. Though it is widely accepted that the Geneva Bible was the Bible most familiar to Shakespeare, the text was not a uniform entity; as Fulton reminds us, “Its notes change significantly at various points throughout its publication history, including at least a hundred and forty editions” (142 n26). Cf. A. S. Herbert, Historical Catalogue of Printed Editions of the English Bible 1525–1961 (New York: American Bible Society, 1968) and J. Kearney, “Reformed

Notes to Pages 55–57

10. 11.

12. 13.

14.

15. 16. 17.

18. 19.

20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

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Ventriloquism: The Shepheardes Calender and the Craft of Commentary,” Spenser Studies 26 (2011): 111–51. On the versions of the English Bible available to Shakespeare, cf. Shaheen, Biblical References, 17–50, and Hamlin, The Bible in Shakespeare, 9–42. Fulton, “Shakespeare’s Everyman,” 125. See Poole (Chapter 4) and Lander (Chapter 11) in this volume. B. Smalley, The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages (Oxford: University of Notre Dame Press, 1989); H. de Lubac, Medieval Exegesis: The Four Senses of Scripture. 3 vols. (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1959). On early modern adaptations of medieval models, see P. Harrison, The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science (Cambridge University Press, 2001); B. Cummings, The Literary Culture of the Reformation: Grammar and Grace (Oxford University Press, 2001); and R. McDermott, Tropologies: Ethics and Invention in England, c. 1350–1600 (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2016). See J. Simpson, Burning to Read: English Fundamentalism and its Reformation Opponents (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). B. Cummings, “Protestant Allegory,” in The Cambridge Companion to Allegory, eds. R. Copeland and P. Struck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); 185. See also Simpson, Burning to Read, 107. J. Simpson, “Tyndale as Promoter of Figural Allegory and Figurative Language: A Brief Declaration of the Sacraments,” Archiv für das Studium der Neueren Sprachen und Literaturen 245 (2008): 48; see, more broadly, 37–55. Simpson, “Tyndale as Promoter of Figural Allegory,” 37. More’s dispute over John 6 was not restricted to Joye, for More also debated John Frith on this same passage; cf. Zysk, Shadow and Substance, 42–45. That the debate between More and Joye also entails accusations of misinterpreting scripture is typical of Reformation polemic; cf. Kearney, “Reformed Ventriloquism,” 119–26. George Joye, The Souper of the Lorde (London[?], 1533), sig. Aiir. Simpson, “Tyndale,” 49–50. Simpson states that More “sounds at least consonant with evangelical expositors of Scripture in his Answer to a Poisoned Book, when he insists on the primacy of the literal sense” (50). Thomas More, The answere to the fyrst parte of the poysened booke ([London]: 1534 [i.e. 1533?]), sig. A8r. Joye, The Souper of the Lorde, sig. Avir. More, The answere, sig. K3v. More, The answere, sig. K4r. More, The answere, sig. A5r.

246

Notes to Pages 58–65

25. Kearney, “Reformed Ventriloquism,” 125. Such an argument, Kearney writes, counters the idea that a vernacular Bible “could provide a shared understanding of scripture by controlling the experience of reading through the margins of the page” (123). 26. William Fulke, The text of the New Testament of Jesus Christ, translated out of the vulgar Latine by the papists of the traiterous seminarie at Rhemes (London, 1589), sig. Dd5v. 27. Fulke, The text of the New Testament of Jesus Christ, sig. Dd5v. 28. The New Testament of Jesus Christ, translated faithfully into English out of the authentical Latin (Rheims, 1582), sig. Ffiiiiv. 29. Rheims New Testament, sig. Ggiiiv. 30. Rheims New Testament, sig. Ggiiv. 31. Rheims New Testament, sig. Ggiir. 32. Fulke, The text of the New Testament of Jesus Christ, sig. Dd5v. 33. Fulke, The text of the New Testament of Jesus Christ, sig. Dd5v. 34. The Byble in English (The Great Bible) (London, 1539), fol. Xxxixr; Geneva Bible (1578), sig. Ggvv. 35. Aquinas, for one, argues that in the Eucharist Christ is truly present in substance but that he does not impose upon the communicant the burden of ingesting his flesh and blood; rather, Christ offers his true body and true blood under the species of bread and wine; cf. Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, III.76. 36. Rheims New Testament, sig. Ggiiv. 37. Cf. Kearney, “Reformed Ventriloquism,” 128–31, on this and other major revisions to the 1578 edition. 38. Thomas Cranmer, An aunswere of the most reuerend father in God Thomas Archebyshop of Canterburye (London, 1551), sig. Miiiv. On Cranmer’s Eucharistic theology, see Anderson, Translating Investments, 36–60. 39. Geneva Bible (1578), sig. Ggvir. These and subsequent glosses are unchanged from the 1560 edition and are retained in subsequent editions. 40. Geneva Bible (1578), sig. Ggvir. 41. Geneva Bible (1578), sig. Ggviv. 42. Lever (ed.), Measure for Measure, 22. 43. “Precise,” 3a, Oxford English Dictionary Online. Oxford University Press, 2017. On the puritanical context, see Lake and Questier, The Antichrist’s Lewd Hat, 629–30. 44. Psalm 34:1 (Geneva Bible, 1578). 45. Shuger, Political Theologies, 81. 46. Beckwith, Shakespeare and the Grammar of Forgiveness, 61. 47. Lake and Questier, The Antichrist’s Lewd Hat, 699.

Notes to Pages 66–70

247

48. H. Berger, Jr. “What Does the Duke Know and When Does He Know It?: Carrying the Torch in Measure for Measure,” in Making Trifles of Terrors: Redistributing Complicities in Shakespeare (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997): 336. Shuger reads Vincentio in the alternate context of James I as a curate of souls: “The Duke’s compassionate regard for the sufferings of women and children, his desire that Isabella forgive Angelo, that Angelo repent, that Claudio and Barnardine not die unprepared, attests to an overriding concern for the morals and spiritual good of individuals” (Political Theologies, 109). 49. Fulton, “Shakespeare’s Everyman,” 134. 50. Lake and Questier, The Antichrist’s Lewd Hat, 696.

4 Words of Diverse Significations: Hamlet’s Puns, Amphibology, and Allegorical Hermeneutics 1. Hamlet, 1.2.65, 67, 74. All quotations from Hamlet are from A. Thompson and N. Taylor (eds.), Hamlet, The Arden Shakespeare, Third Series (London: Thomson Learning, 2006). All citations hereafter appear in the text. 2. For the film production, see Hamlet, dir. G. Doran, BBC Wales (2009). 3. J. Culler, “The Call of the Phoneme: Introduction,” in J. Culler (ed.), On Puns: The Foundation of Letters (Oxford and New York: Blackwell, 1988), 6. 4. For the date, see C. Bates, “The Point of Puns,” Modern Philology 96.4 (1999): 425, n. 11. For the earlier terms used for puns, see S. Read, “Puns: Serious Wordplay,” in S. Adamson, G. Alexander, and K. Ettenhuber (eds.), Renaissance Figures of Speech (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 82. While I’m cognizant that “pun” is anachronistic and historically derogatory, for the purposes of my argument here I find the term nonetheless the most practical. 5. G. MacDonald (ed.), The Tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmarke: A Study with the Text of the Folio of 1623 (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1885), 185n. 6. F. W. Farrar, History of Interpretation (London: Macmillan and Co., 1886), 139, 138. 7. B. Cummings, “Protestant Allegory,” in R. Copeland and P. Struck (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Allegory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 178. For a survey of this anti-allegorical slant in biblical studies, see M. C. Parsons, “‘Allegorizing Allegory’: Narrative Analysis and Parable Interpretation,” Perspectives in Religious Studies 15.2 (1988): 148–50. 8. M. Quilligan, The Language of Allegory: Defining the Genre (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1979), 33.

248

Notes to Pages 70–72

9. See P. J. Voss, “To Prey or Not to Prey: Prayer and Punning in Hamlet,” Hamlet Studies 23 (2001): 60–1. 10. M. Adamczyk, “The Formal Composition of Puns in Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost: A Corpus-Based Study,” Studia Anglica Posnaniensia 42 (2006): 301–21. She writes, “The multiplicity of punning forms there is largely the consequence of the specificity of the English language which was undergoing sweeping changes in the Elizabethan era, principally lexical (such as the importation of Romance loan-words). Lexically well-stocked, syntactically unconstrained and marked by a sharp pronunciation – orthography asymmetry (the consequence of the pre-Elizabethan phonological changes, namely the Great Vowel Shift) – English proved especially conducive to homonymous, homophonous and paronymous punning structures, all present in the examined corpus” (318). 11. Read, “Puns: Serious Wordplay” 81. 12. Robert Rollock, A Treatise of Gods Effectual Calling, trans. Henry Holland (London, 1603), 62. This is a translation of Rollock’s Tractatus de vocatione efficaci (Edinburgh, 1597). 13. See, for instance, R. A. Bohlmann, Principles of Biblical Interpretation in the Lutheran Confessions, revised edition (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1983), 82–3. 14. See T. Fulton, “Shakespeare’s Everyman: Measure for Measure and English Fundamentalism,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 40.1 (2010): 119–47; and “Toward a New Cultural History of the Geneva Bible,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 47.3 (2017), and Zysk, Chapter 3 in this volume. 15. Rollock, A treatise of Gods effectual calling, 63. 16. See R. A. Muller’s discussion of Rollock in Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics: The Rise and Development of Reformed Orthodoxy, ca. 1520 to ca. 1725, vol. 2 of Muller’s Holy Scripture: The Cognitive Foundation of Theology, 2nd edn (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 1993, 2003), 334. Muller uses Rollock, A treatise of Gods effectual calling, 333–5, as an example of perspicuity. 17. Cummings, “Protestant Allegory,” 177. Cummings cites from D. Martin Luthers Werke,Weimar Ausgabe, 80 vols. (Weimar: Heinrich Böhlau, 1880– 2007). In Pelikan’s English translation, “scum” appears as “froth”; Luther’s Works, ed. J. Pelikan, 56 vols. (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1955– 86), I:233. 18. Cummings, “Protestant Allegory,” 179. 19. Cummings, “Protestant Allegory,” 182. 20. Cummings, “Protestant Allegory,” 184. Here, too, we find the continuation of a medieval hermeneutic: “[Nicholas of] Lyra would also develop an ingenious method of balancing the literal and the spiritual senses which then became

Notes to Pages 72–74

21. 22.

23. 24. 25. 26.

27. 28.

29. 30. 31.

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standard practice in the Late Middle Ages. For he contended that there may in fact be both a mystical and an historical sense under the same letter: this is known as the ‘double literal sense’ (duplex sensus litteralis)”: I. C. Levy, “The Literal Sense of Scripture and the Search for Truth in the Late Middle Ages,” Revue d’histoire ecclésiastique 104.3–4 (2009): 788. Cummings, “Protestant Allegory,” 185. D. C. Steinmetz, “Divided by a Common Past: The Reshaping of the Christian Exegetical Tradition in the Sixteenth Century,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 27.2 (1997): 249. J. Kearney, The Incarnate Text: Imagining the Book in Reformation England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 78. The OED cites Bacon, Confession Faith in Works (1879), I:338–2. M. F. Johnson, “Another Look at St. Thomas and the Plurality of the Literal Sense of Scripture,” Medieval Philosophy and Theology 2 (1992): 122. J. Altieri, “Pregnant Puns and Sectarian Rhetoric: Middleton’s Family of Love,” Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 22.4 (1989): 45–57; 56. Altieri argues that Middleton’s play sets out to satirize the Familists’ “mode of expression ... the confusion of literal and figurative meanings fostered by sectarian rhetoric, and the resultant cheapening of the figurative” (48). The Family of Love was a source of late-sixteenth cultural anxiety in large part because of their purported verbal distortions, which included equivocation and allegorizing; see K. Poole, Radical Religion from Shakespeare to Milton: Figures of Nonconformity in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), chapter 3, esp. 82–7. Cited in Read, “Puns,” 88. See M. Schoenfeldt, “The Real Presence of Unstated Puns: Herbert’s ‘Love (III)’,” in R. McDonald, N. D. Nace, and T. D. Williams (eds.), Shakespeare Up Close: Reading Early Modern Texts (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 77, and J. Zysk, Shadow and Substance: Eucharistic Controversy and English Drama across the Reformation Divide (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame, 2017), chapter 3. We should note that this understanding of divinely instituted puns is a far cry from the approach to puns in poststructuralist theory, which views them as a haphazard feature of a fraught linguistic structure. See C. Bates, “The Point of Puns,” Modern Philology 96.4 (1999): 424, and J. Derrida, “Proverb: ‘He That Would Pun ... ’,” in J. Leavey, Jr., Glassary (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986). Read, “Puns,” 90. Read, “Puns,” 91. Robert Greene, Morando the tritameron of loue (London, 1587), II: sig. H2v.

250

Notes to Pages 76–82

32. John King, Lectures vpon Ionas, deliuered at Yorke, in the Yeare of Our Lord 1594 (Oxford, 1599), 11, original italics. Here and throughout, I have silently modernized u, v, i, and j. 33. King, Lectures vpon Ionas, 290–1. 34. King, Lectures vpon Ionas, 293. 35. King, Lectures vpon Ionas, 318, 292, 292. 36. More precisely, plenus can go with the ablative to give the sense of something being packed full or burdened. Thanks to Faith Garrett for the translation help. 37. John Howson, A sermon preached at Paules Crosse, the 24 of December 1597 (London, 1597), 1–2. 38. Howson, A sermon, 1–2. 39. John Howson, A second sermon preached at Paules Crosse, the 21 of May, 1598, vpon the 21 of Math. The 12. and 13. Verses. Concluding a former sermon preached the 4 of December 1597, vpon the same Text (London, 1598). 40. Howson, A second sermon, 18, 19, 39. 41. Howson, A second sermon, 6. 42. George Gyfford, Sermons vpon the whole booke of the Reuelation (London, 1596, 1599), sig. B1v. 43. Gyfford, Sermons, sig. B1v. 44. Gyfford, Sermons, sig. Dr. 45. Gyfford, Sermons, sig. C6v. 46. Rollock, A Treatise, 62, 63. 47. Rollock, A Treatise, 65. 48. Rollock, A Treatise, 65. 49. J. Shapiro, 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare (New York: HarperCollins, 2005), 287–8. For an extended study of the topic, see G. T. Wright, “Hendiadys and Hamlet,” PMLA 96.2 (1981): 168–93. 50. King, Lectures vpon Ionas, 315. 51. King, Lectures vpon Ionas, 315, original italics. 52. For the development of equivocation and its relationship to amphibology, see P. Zagorin, Ways of Lying: Dissimulation, Persecution, and Conformity in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990) and A. Dailey, The English Martyr from Reformation to Revolution (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012), chapter 5. 53. M. de Grazia, Hamlet without Hamlet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 183. 54. Adamczyk, “The Formal Composition of Puns,” 301–2. 55. Gyfford, Sermons, sig. B1v. 56. Luther, Table Talk, in Pelikan, ed., Works LIV, 46; cited in B. Kiefer Lewalski, Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 117. Although Lewalski does not develop

Notes to Pages 82–87

57. 58. 59.

60. 61.

62. 63. 64. 65.

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the full-scale notion of Protestant allegory found in subsequent scholars such as Cummings and Steinmetz, she notes that reformers “revised medieval concepts in several ways – perhaps most fundamentally in their recognition of typological meanings as a part or dimension of the literal text rather than as one of several distinct senses” (117). S. Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 240. Thompson and Taylor (eds.), Hamlet, 252n. R. W. Dent, Shakespeare’s Proverbial Language (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), L505.1; cited in Thompson and Taylor (eds.), Hamlet, 303n. This proverb is referenced twice in Two Gentlemen of Verona. Steinmetz, “Divided by a Common Past,” 249, 250. Howson, A Sermon, 30–1, 34. Howson speaks directly to issues like student debt, the challenges of entering the clerical job market, and the low pay relative to other professions. See P. Stallybrass, et al., “Hamlet’s Tables and the Technologies of Writing in Renaissance England,” Shakespeare Quarterly 55.4 (2004): 379–419. Henry Smith, Fovre Sermons Preached By Master Henry Smith (London, 1599), sig. B1r. John Bradford, Two Notable Sermons … the one of Repentance, the other of the Lord’s supper (London, 1599), sig. A5r–v. As T. H. Luxon, Literal Figures: Puritan Allegory and the Reformation Crisis in Representation (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 26, has argued, the conflicts and inconsistencies in the Reformation relationship of literal and allegorical would lead in the seventeenth century to phenomenological problems, since “reformed Christianity, for all of its insistence on literalism, remain[ed] profoundly committed to an allegorical ontology.”

5 England’s Jerusalem in Shakespeare’s Henriad 1. 2 Henry IV, 4.3.366. The source text for Shakespeare’s plays is S. Greenblatt, et al. (eds.), The Norton Shakespeare: Based on the Oxford Edition, 2nd edn. (New York: Norton, 2008). All Shakespearean citations hereafter appear in the text. 2. A. Gurr (ed.), Henry V (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 13. The French chronicler Enguerrand de Monstrelet (with whom the legend appears to have originated) intends for Henry to be humbled by this death for his hubristic plans of conquest (which included France as well as Jerusalem). See J. Dacier (ed.), The Chronicles of Enguerrand de Monstrelet, trans. T. Johnes, 2 vols. (London: H. G. Bohn, 1867), I:483.

252

Notes to Pages 87–90

3. A. Bale, Feeling Persecuted: Christians, Jews and Images of Violence in the Middle Ages (London: Reaktion Books, 2010), 120. 4. George Wither, Britain’s Remembrancer (1628), 2 vols. ([Manchester]: Spenser Society, 1880), II:340. For more on this connection see B. Groves, The Destruction of Jerusalem in Early Modern English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), and A. Guibbory, Christian Identity: Jews and Israel in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). 5. Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland, 6 vols. (London: J. Johnson, et al., 1807–8), III:57. 6. K. Sharpe, Reading Authority and Representing Rule in Early Modern England (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 59–69; K. R. Firth, The Apocalyptic Tradition in Reformation Britain 1530–1645 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979); B. W. Ball, A Great Expectation: Eschatological Thought in English Protestantism to 1660 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1975); E. Gilman Richey, The Politics of Revelation in the English Renaissance (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1998). 7. All biblical quotations, unless otherwise noted, come from the Geneva version: The Bible, Translated according to The Ebrew and Greeke, and conferred with the best translations in diuers Languages (London, 1594). I have chosen this version as it was a version of the Geneva Bible circulating widely and contemporaneously with Shakespeare’s plays and because the Geneva is the version from which Shakespeare quotes most frequently. See B. Groves, “Shakespeare’s Sonnets and Genevan Marginalia,” Essays in Criticism 58.2 (2007): 114–28, and N. Shaheen, Biblical References in Shakespeare’s Plays (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1999), 17–50. 8. B. R. Rossing, The Choice Between Two Cities: Whore, Bride, and Empire in the Apocalypse (Harrisburg: Harvard Theological Studies, 1999), 165, 161. 9. Thomas Lodge, The Complete Works of Thomas Lodge, 4 vols. (New York: Russell & Russell, 1963), I:48. 10. J. Bruce and W. Tite (eds.), Diary of John Manningham, of the Middle Temple (London: J.B. Nichols and Sons, 1868), 127–8. 11. J. Moody (ed.), The Private Life of an Elizabethan Lady: The Diary the Lady Margaret Hoby 1599–1605 (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 1998), 24. 12. W. H. Sherman, Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 73. 13. Bible (London, 1578); BOD Bib. Eng. 1577 d.1. 14. Bible (London, 1578); BOD Vet. A1 b.13. 15. Bible (London, 1598); BOD Bib. Eng. 1598 e.3. 16. See Groves, Destruction of Jerusalem. 17. H. Hamlin, The Bible in Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 140; see, more broadly, 140–3.

Notes to Pages 90–93

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18. H. Hamlin, Psalm Culture and Early Modern English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 244 (see 242–3 for Psalm 137). For further references to Psalm 137 in the Henriad, see Shaheen, Biblical References, 386, 455. 19. Hamlin, Psalm Culture, 244. 20. For an in-depth discussion of this Eden imagery, see Hamlin, Bible in Shakespeare, 133–47. 21. Daniel Heinsius, The Mirrour of Humilitie, trans. I. H. (London, 1618), 87. See also B. Groves, “Pilgrimage in Paradise Lost,” Milton Studies 53 (2012): 127–46. 22. Shaheen, Biblical References, 408. 23. “A voyage which he meant to make into the holie land, there to recouer the citie of Ierusalem from the Infidels. For it gréeued him to consider the great malice of christian princes, that were bent vpon a mischéefous purpose to destroie one another, to the peril of their owne soules, rather than to make war against the enimies of the christian faith, as in conscience (it séemed to him) they were bound” (Holinshed’s Chronicles, III.57). 24. Jerome, Letters and Select Works, in A Select Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, second series, ed. H. Wace and P. Schaff (Oxford: Parker & Company, 1893), vol. 6, 120 (Letter 58, section 3). For more on medieval mental pilgrimage, see J. Sumption, Pilgrimage: An Image of Mediaeval Religion (London: Faber & Faber, 1975), 300–1. 25. C. Roth, “New Light on the Resettlement,” Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England 11 (1924–7): 113–14. 26. Manasseh Ben Israel, Vindiciae Judaeorum, or a Letter in Answer to Certain Questions (London, 1656), sig. E4r. 27. A. MacFarlane (ed.), The Diary of Ralph Josselin 1616–1683 (Oxford: The British Academy, 1976/1991), 224. 28. B. Kiefer Lewalski, Protestant Poetics and Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 131–2. 29. Lambert Daneau, A Frvitfull Commentarie vpon the twelue Small Prophets, trans. John Stockwood (London, 1594), 796. 30. Holinshed’s Chronicles, 4.952. 31. George Widley, The Doctrine of the Sabbath, Handled in Fovre Severall Bookes or Treatises (London, 1604), 190. 32. John King, Lectvres vpon Ionas, Delivered at Yorke in the Yeare of Our Lorde 1594 (Oxford, 1599), 660. 33. Richard Robinson, The Avncient Order, Societie, and Unitie Laudable, of Prince Arthure, and his knightly Armory of the Round Table (London, 1583), sig. *2v. 34. The phrase is from a letter from Sir Edward Barton to Walsingham on September 13, 1588. See W. D. Hamilton (ed.), Calendar of State Papers,

254

35. 36. 37. 38.

39. 40. 41.

42. 43.

44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51.

Notes to Pages 93–95 Domestic Series, of the Reign of Charles 1. 1639, vol. 14 (London: H. M. Stationery Office, 1873), 200. John Lyly, Euphues and His England (London, 1580), 118. E. Kitzinger, “The Cult of Images in the Age before Iconoclasm,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 8 (1954): 105. Of This Chapell Se Here the Fundacyon (London, 1496). B. Bandinel (ed.), The Itineraries of William Wey, Fellow of Eton College (London, 1857), xxx. For more on this, see B. Groves, “‘Those Sanctified Places Where our Sauiours Feete Had trode:’ Jerusalem in English Early Modern Travel Narratives,” Sixteenth Century Journal 43.3 (2012): 681–700. William Lithgow, The Totall Discourse (London, 1640), 265–6. A. Stewart (ed.), Anonymous Pilgrims, I-VIII (London: Palestine Pilgrims’ Text Society, 1894), 2. M. Ord, Travel and Experience in Early Modern English Literature (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 144–5, 11; G. M. MacLean, The Rise of Oriental Travel: English Visitors to the Ottoman Empire, 1580–1720 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 102–3; A. Behdad, Belated Travelers: Orientalism in the Age of Colonial Dissolution (Cork: Cork University Press, 1994), 45. H. Maundrell, A Journey from Aleppo to Jerusalem in 1697, ed. D. Howell (Beirut: Khayats, 1963), xix. J. Wilkinson (ed.), Jerusalem Pilgrims: Before the Crusades (Warminster: Aris & Phillips, 1977), 123. See Henry Timberlake, A True and Strange Discourse of the Trauailes of Two English Pilgrimes (London: 1603), 19; Lithgow, Totall Discourse, 265; George Sandys, A Relation of a Iourney Begun An: Dom: 1610 (London, 1627), 167. Timberlake, True and Strange Discourse, 18, 19. C. W. Wilson (ed. and trans.), The Pilgrimage of the Russian Abbot Daniel in the Holy Land (London: Palestine Pilgrims’ Text Society, 1895), 2. Timberlake, True and Strange Discourse, 10. Timberlake, True and Strange Discourse, 21. Timberlake, True and Strange Discourse, 21–3. Sampson Price, Londons Warning by Laodicea’s Luke-warmnesse (London, 1613), sig. H2v. Richard Hakluyt, The Principall Navigations, Voiages and Discoveries of the English Nation (London, 1589), 182. See H. Ellis (ed.), The Pylgrymage of Sir Richard Guylforde to the Holy Land, A.D. 1506 (London: Camden Society, 1851), 24; Itinerary of A Certain Englishman (1344–5) in E. Hoade (ed.), Western Pilgrims (Jerusalem: Franciscan Printing Press, 1952/1970), 65; J. Brefeld, “An Account of

Notes to Pages 95–104

52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60.

61.

62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67.

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a Pilgrimage to Jerusalem,” Zeitschrift des Deutschen Palästina-Vereins 101.2 (1985): 71. R. B. McKerrow and F. P. Wilson (eds.), The Works of Thomas Nashe, 5 vols. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1958), III:408. D. Grantley, London in Early Modern English Drama: Representing the Built Environment (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 47, 188, 57. P. Binski, Westminster Abbey and the Plantagenets: Kingship and the Representation of Power 1200–1400 (London: Yale University Press, 1995), 4. Binski, Westminster Abbey, 7. Holinshed’s Chronicles, 3.57–8. Binski, Westminster Abbey, 6. Holinshed’s Chronicles, 3.57. Sumption, Pilgrimage, 137–8, 126. M. C. Seymour (ed.), The Defective Version of Mandeville’s Travels, EETS 319 (Oxford, 2002), 3. For the continued popularity of this text in the Elizabethan period, see J. Bennett, The Rediscovery of Sir John Mandeville (New York: MLA, 1954), 244–60. Binski, Westminster Abbey, 142; D. J. Hall, English Mediaeval Pilgrimage (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1965), 178; Brefeld, “An Account of a Pilgrimage to Jerusalem,” 139. D. Dyas, Pilgrimage in Medieval English Literature 700–1500 (Cambridge: Brewer, 2001), 238 and throughout. See P. Edwards, Pilgrimage and Literary Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). John Stow, A Summarie of Englyshe Chronicles ([London:] 1565), fol. 136v. John Stow, The Chronicles of England, from Brute vnto this present yeare of Christ, 1580 (London, 1580), 581; Shaheen, Biblical References, 469–70. Stow, Summarie, fol. 140v. Urbanus Rhegius, The Solace of Sion, and Ioy of Iervsalem, trans. R. Robinson (London, 1587), [ ]v.

6 Discontented Harmonies: Words against Words in Pomfret Castle 1. See J. Kugel, The Bible As It Was: Biblical Traditions of Late Antiquity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), x–xi. 2. See, for instance, M. Quilligan’s elegant brief epitome under “reader in the Faerie Queene” in A. C. Hamilton, et al. (eds.), The Spenser Encyclopedia (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990), 585–7. 3. Bible translated according to the Ebrew and Greeke (London, 1599), STC 2173. From the prefatory poem “Of the incomparable treasure of the holy Scriptures, with a prayer for the true use of the same.”

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Notes to Pages 104–110

4. Bible, STC 2173. From the prefatory address “To the Christian Reader.” 5. For Derrida’s original formulation, “Il n’y a pas de hors-texte,” see De la grammatologie (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1967), 227 (tr. as Of Grammatology by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976], 158). 6. Richard II, 5.5.1. Quotations from Richard II are taken from the Arden Shakespeare, Third Series edition of C. R. Forker (London: Methuen, 2002). 7. Similar points are made in the parallel places in Matthew 19 and Luke 18, though Richard’s allusions are not specific to any one of these. The incidents are not in John. 8 See the note on such hypermetric lineation in general in Arden Shakespeare, Third Series by Forker, 517–18. 9. William Shakespeare, Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies (London, 1623), sig. d4v. 10. The practice continues today in ordinary Christian popular culture – the familiar “Nativity story” is a carefully harmonized account. 11. Augustine, De Consensu evangelistarum 1.7.10, my translation. The Latin text is available online at www.augustinus.it/latino/consenso_evangelisti/index.htm 12. See J.-M. Roessli, “De consensus evangelistarum” in K. Pollman, et al. (eds.), The Oxford Guide to the Historical Reception of Augustine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 261–6, and D. L. Dungan, A History of the Synoptic Problem: The Canon, the Text, the Composition, and the Interpretation of the Gospels (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999). 13. An even more ancient testimony, the “Egerton 2” papyrus fragments, discovered in 1934, suggests that the very early flux of competing gospels already included harmonizing and overlap among different accounts, oral or written. See S. E. Porter, “Recent efforts to Reconstruct Early Christianity on the Basis of its Papyrological Evidence,” in S. Porter and A. Pitts (eds.), Christian Origins and Graeco-Roman Culture (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 71–84. 14. D. Ellenburg, “Is Harmonisation Honest?” in Harmony of the Gospels, ed. S. L. Cox and K. H. Easley (Nashville: Holman Bible Publishers, 2007), 3. 15. The text can be found at www.wycliffitebible.org/2.html. See E. Schirmer, “Canon Wars and Outlier Manuscripts: Gospel Harmony in the Lollard Controversy,” Huntington Library Quarterly 73.1 (2010): 1–36. For a contrasting view, see H. A. Kelly, The Middle English Bible: A Reassessment (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016). For the Middle English source, see J. R. Harris, “The Gospel Harmony of Clement of Llanthony,” Journal of Biblical Literature 43.3/4 (1924): 349–62. 16. Osiander, Harmoniae evangelicae libri IIII ... [etc.] (Basel: 1537), t.p., translation mine. 17. Osiander, Harmoniae, sigs. H.12r and H.12v–i.1r.

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18. For Calvin’s understanding of John in relation to the synoptic gospels, see R. A. Muller, The Unaccommodated Calvin: Studies in the Foundation of a Theological Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 33. 19. John Calvin, A Harmonie upon the Three Evangelists, Matthew, Mark and Luke, with the Commentarie of M. John Calvin, trans. Eusebius Paget (London, 1584), 527. 20. Calvin, Harmonie, 527. 21. Calvin, Harmonie, 528. 22. An important contemporary Roman Catholic harmony is that of Cornelius Jansenius of Ghent, published in Louvain in 1549 and supplemented with a voluminous commentary in 1571–2. See W. Francois, “Augustine and the Golden Age of Biblical Scholarship in Louvain (1550–1650),” in B. Gordon and M. McLean (eds.), Shaping the Bible in the Reformation: Books, Scholars, and Their Readers in the Sixteenth Century (Leiden: Brill 2012), 235–90 (250–5). 23. See B. Cummings, Mortal Thoughts: Religion, Secularity and Identity in Shakespeare and Early Modern Culture (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2013), 190. 24. Such controversies continue. At http://bibviz.com there is a compelling visual representation of what its designer identifies as “Bible contradictions.” 25. For the complicated history of this clause, see E. C. S. Gibson, The ThirtyNine Articles of the Church of England, 2 vols. (London: Methuen, 1896), II: 511–28. 26. “Come, little ones” also leads in interesting directions, perhaps to Richard’s queen. See D. Williams, Shakespeare and the Performance of Girlhood (New York: Palgrave, 2014), 52–72. 27. See J. Marcus, Mark 8–16. Anchor Yale Bible. vol. 27A (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 731. Aquinas’s gloss, to Matthew 19:24, is available translated at: http://dhspriory.org/thomas/english/CAMatthew.htm#19. Other commentators attempted to alleviate the problem by allegorizing. Augustine argued, for instance, that the camel represents Christ bearing our mortality and the needle the pangs of his suffering; see Aquinas on Luke 18:25: http://dhspriory.org/thomas/CALuke.htm#18. 28. W. L. Edgerton, “Shakespeare and the ‘Needle’s Eye’,” MLN 66.8 (1951): 549–50. In the Paraphrases Erasmus does not explicitly repeat the tale of the literal “needle’s eye” gate, which he had rejected as a fabrication in the Novum Instrumentum, but instead relies on a more periphrastic extension found in Jerome: “For the gate is low and straight, and it receiveth no Camel laden with burdens of richesse”; see The First Tome or Volume of the Paraphrase of Erasmus upon the New Testament (London, 1548), sig. N1v. Where Shakespeare might have encountered the specific legend of the little Jerusalem gate is not clear,

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29.

30.

31.

32.

33.

34.

35.

36. 37.

Notes to Pages 113–117 though Richard’s allusion strongly suggests that he had. See also P. Ure, ed., Richard II, 4th edn. rev. of Arden Shakespeare, Second Series (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1956), 170, and the discussion by Cummings, Mortal Thoughts, 191–5. The Folio text removes the adjective, whether through scrupulous adherence to the scriptural text, or reduced tolerance for reading “needle” as the monosyllable “neele.” On this, see H. Bloom,The Anxiety of Influence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), passim. For Bloom, what a poem refuses or evades is as important as what is admitted or acknowledged, often more so. H. Hamlin describes Richard II as “especially rich in biblical allusion,” noting its specific allusive patterns; see The Bible in Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013) for Christ figures (72, 187), the Fall (135–42), and Psalm 137 (54). An exemplary experiment in tracking the resonances of a single psalm through various reappropriations is chapter 7 of Hamlin’s Psalm Culture and Early Modern English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); for Psalm 137, see 242–4. The Mirror of Man’s Life (London, 1576), sig. D.iii.v. The work was a popular success, reprinted the same year, and with subsequent editions in 1577, 1580, and 1586. See De Contemptu Mundi (also known as De miseria humanae conditionis) in J.-P. Migne (ed.), Patrologia Latina (Paris, 1855), vol. 217, cols. 701–46; the Latin of the passage quoted above (“O unhappy and wretched creature that I am”) is at col. 713. King Richard is of course a kind of anti-David: where David was anointed by Samuel (1 Samuel 16), Richard has now been “unanointed” by Bolingbroke. For further discussion of the figure of King David in the “second tetralogy” of Shakespeare’s history plays, see D. Evett, “Types of King David in Shakespeare’s Lancastrian Tetralogy,” Shakespeare Studies 14 (1981): 139–61. The exact instrumentation is not specified, but Richard’s reference to “a disordered string” suggests either lute or viol (or, possibly a harp), the instruments referred to in versions of the psalm. Richard’s comment on musical error suggests a solo instrument. See Forker’s note (Richard II, Arden Third Series, 464) which cites an RSC production in which the groom entered bearing a lute, presumably as the musician. Were the offstage music to be a recognizable psalm tune, the point would be even clearer. See for instance F. Kermode, Shakespeare’s Language (New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2000), 43, as cited and discussed by Cummings, Mortal Thoughts, 185–6.

Notes to Pages 117–122

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38. See S. Orgel, “Gendering the Crown,” in The Authentic Shakespeare and Other Problems of the Early Modern Stage (New York: Routledge, 2002), 115. See also Orgel’s comment that “one cannot control the implications of imagery, or close it off to interpretation” in Orgel, “Prologue: I am Richard II,” in A. Petrina and L. Tosi (eds.), Representations of Elizabeth I in Early Modern Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2011), 19. I thank Professor Deanne Williams for drawing my attention to these quotations.

7 Titus Andronicus and the Rhetoric of Lamentation 1. For their helpful comments and suggestions, I am grateful to the editors and to my colleague Richard Stacey. Versions of this chapter were given as papers to the Literature, Theology, and the Arts Research Seminar at the University of Glasgow, and to the Department of English Literature at the University of Hull – my thanks to colleagues at both for their thoughtful engagement. 2. As the UK press reported of the Globe’s 2014 production, many audience members fainted at the entrance of the raped and mutilated Lavinia, including the reviewer for The Independent, Holly Williams. See H. Williams, “Titus Andronicus, Shakespeare’s Globe, Theatre Review,” The Independent, May 2, 2014, www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/reviews/titu s-andronicus-shakespeare-s-globe-theatre-review-9315656.html. 3. On the genus iudiciale, see Q. Skinner, Forensic Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 1–3, 5–6, 60–3. See too the discussion of Titus in L. Hutson, The Invention of Suspicion: Law and Mimesis in Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 90–103, and D. Callaghan and C. R. Kyle, “The Wilde Side of Justice in Early Modern England and Titus Andronicus,” in C. Jordan and K. Cunningham (eds.), The Law in Shakespeare (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 38–57. 4. All citations of the play are from William Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus, The Arden Shakespeare, Third Series, ed. J. Bate (London and New York: Routledge, 1995). 5. V. G. Dickson, “‘A Pattern, Precedent, and Lively Warrant’: Emulation, Rhetoric, and Cruel Propriety in Titus Andronicus,” Renaissance Quarterly 62.2 (2009): 379. 6. The word “lament” or its cognates are used six times in the play by the Andronici to describe their afflictions, three of which occur in Act 3, Scene 1: the word “lamentable” also forms part of the play’s full title. On biblical uses in the play, see N. Shaheen, Biblical References in Shakespeare’s Plays (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1999), 497–509. 7. John Udall, A Commentarie vpon the Lamentations of Ieremy (London, 1593), 98.

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Notes to Pages 122–125

8. Lancelot Andrewes writes that Nature compels us “to behold” sorrow “as being our selues in the bodie which may be one day in the like sorrowfull case” in The Copie of the Sermon preached on good Friday last before the Kings Maiestie (London, 1604), sig. B2r. 9. S. Clarke Hulse, “Wresting the Alphabet: Oratory and Action in Titus Andronicus,” Criticism 21.2 (1979): 106–18, esp. 108. 10. See Shaheen, Biblical References, 497–509, and E. Giddens, “The Genesis of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus,” Literature and Theology 12.4 (1998): 341–9. See too N. Moschovakis, “‘Irreligious Piety and Christian History’: Persecution as Pagan Anachronism in Titus Andronicus,” Shakespeare Quarterly 53.4 (2002): 460–86. 11. G. Murray Kendall, “‘Lend Me Thy Hand’: Metaphor and Mayhem in Titus Andronicus,” Shakespeare Quarterly 40.3 (1989): 299–316, esp. 300–3. 12. R. Meek, “‘O, What a Sympathy of Woe Is This’: Passionate Sympathy in Titus Andronicus,” Shakespeare Survey 66 (2013): 287–97. 13. Dickson, “A Pattern, Precedent, and Lively Warrant,” 379. 14. See for example P. Parker, Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property (London: Methuen, 1987); B. Vickers, In Defence of Rhetoric (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988); D. K. Shuger, Sacred Rhetoric: The Christian Grand Style in the English Renaissance (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1988); and A. Thorne, Vision and Rhetoric in Shakespeare: Looking Through Language (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000). 15. K. M. O’Connor, Lamentations and the Tears of the World (New York: Orbis Books, 2002), 9. 16. Lamentations is particularly associated with the liturgy of Good Friday. 17. According to Daniel Tossanus, The Lamentations and holy mourninges of the Prophet Ieremiah, trans. Thomas Stocker (London, 1587?), 55–6, “The most excellent Orators haue borrowed many thinges of the holy scriptures.” 18. George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, in English Renaissance Literary Criticism, ed. B. Vickers (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003), 206. 19. Tossanus, The Lamentations, sigs. A11r–A12v. Tossanus frames Lamentations as a de casibus tragedy here. 20. Thomas Nashe, Christs Teares over Ierusalem, in R. B. McKerrow (ed.), The Works of Thomas Nashe, vol. 2 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1966), 15. This text recounts a later fall of Jerusalem under Titus and Vespasian, and Shakespeare draws in a number of places from Nashe’s text in the play – see note 78. The play thus uses two major sources dealing with two falls of Jerusalem, one biblical and one classical. 21. Nashe, Christs Teares over Ierusalem, 16. 22. Nashe, Christs Teares over Ierusalem, see for example 35 and 56–7.

Notes to Pages 125–126

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23. Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, 4 vols., trans. H.E. Butler (London: William Heinemann, 1921), II:VII, ii, 6–7, 421. 24. W. A. Rebhorn, The Emperor of Men’s Minds: Literature and the Renaissance Discourse of Rhetoric (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1995), 83–5, 233. 25. Tossanus, The Lamentations, 83; John Calvin, Commentaries on the Book of the Prophet Jeremiah and the Lamentations, 5 vols., trans. John Owen (Edinburgh: The Calvin Translation Society, 1855), V:332; John Dod, Two Sermons on the Third of the Lamentations Of Ieremie (London, 1608), 6. 26. Justus Lipsius, Two Bookes of Constancie, trans. Iohn Stradling (London, 1594), 99–100. 27. I am using “reason” here in a philosophical rather than theatrical sense: there are obviously identifiable theatrical “reasons” for Titus’s suffering in this scene. A number of commentators on Jeremiah and Lamentations discuss the problem of theodicy, God’s “responsibility” for evil. The orthodox Protestant response, of course, is that God cannot be culpable for evil. Yet the extremity of suffering found in Jeremiah, Lamentations, and Titus does beg the question of how a loving God permits such evil to happen. 28. An important biblical intertext is Jeremiah 15:5: “Who shall then have pitie vpon thee, O Ierusalem? or who shall be sory for thee? or who shall goe to pray for thy peace?” Compare also Titus’s “They would not pity me” (3.1.35) and the marginal note in the Geneva Bible at Lamentations 3:10: “He hath no pitie on me.” Jeremiah warns Judah of their impending destruction by Babylon. All biblical citations are from The Bible, That Is, The Holy Scriptures (London, 1599). 29. See H. Caplan (trans.), Rhetorica ad Herennium (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1954), II.xxxi.50, 151–3, Cicero, On the Orator, Books 1–2, trans. E.W. Sutton and H. Rackham (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1948), I.lvii.245, 179, and Quintilian, Institutio, VI.i.28–9, 401, and XI. iii.8, 247. 30. Rhetorica ad Herennium, II.xxx.47–50, 145–53. 31. Quintilian, Institutio, VI.i.52, 415. 32. Quintilian warns that the careless evocation of pity can lead to an anticlimax or to laughter – Institutio, VI.i.45, 411. 33. There are many examples of anaphora in Lamentations, especially in chapter three. The book follows a poetic form that includes alphabetic acrostics and other alphabetic features at the start of verses. 34. See Lamentations 3:1, 5:1, and also Jeremiah 44:21. See too Hulse, “Wresting the Alphabet,” 107–10.

262

Notes to Pages 127–130

35. John Donne, “The Lamentations of Jeremy, for the most part according to Tremellius,” in A. J. Smith (ed.), John Donne: The Complete English Poems (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), 334. 36. Rhetorica ad Herennium, III.xv.27, 203–5. 37. See for example Moses’s words in Deuteronomy 9:18 and 9:25: “Then I fel downe before the Lord fortie daies and fortie nights, as I fel downe before, because the Lord had said, that he wolde destroye you” (25). 38. O’Conner, Lamentations, 35. 39. Tacitus, The Annales of Cornelivs Tacitvs. The Description of Germanie (London, 1598), 160. See also Josephus’s account of Titus and Vespasian subduing the city of Tyberias; Josephus, The Famovs and Memorable Workes of Iosephus, trans. Thomas Lodge (London, 1602), chapter XVI, 662. 40. See Lamentations 2:5: “The Lord was an enemie: he hath deuoured Israel and consumed all his palaces: he hath destroyed his strong holdes, and hath increased in the daughter of Iudah lamentation and mourning.” 41. The notes to Lamentations 1:4 in the Geneva Bible state that the “heauinesse” of Zion may also be translated as “bitternes.” 42. Rhetorica ad Herennium, II.xxxi.50, 153. 43. Guillaume Du Vair, The Holy Love of Heauenly Wisdome, trans. Thomas Stocker (London, 1594), 353. 44. Roman oratorical manuals were critical of self-pity and tears; see Quintilian, Institutio, VI.i.23–6, 397–9. 45. See Lamentations 2:14: “Thy prophets haue looked out vaine and foolish things for thee, and they haue not discouered thine iniquitie, to turne away thy captiuitie, but haue looked out for thee false prophecies, and causes of banishment.” Jeremiah warns Judah against other prophets who are more sanguine about the threat from Babylon. 46. G. Alexander, “Prosopopoeia,” in S. Adamson, G. Alexander, and K. Ettenhuber (eds.), Renaissance Figures of Speech (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 105. 47. Both Waith and Carter note similarities between Niobe’s story and the play, particularly in relation to female characters like Tamora and Lavinia. See E. Waith, “The Metamorphosis of Violence,” in Titus Andronicus, Shakespeare Survey 10 (1957): 39–49, and S. Carter, “Titus Andronicus and Myths of Female Revenge,” Cahiers Elisabethains 77 (2010): 37–49. 48. Ovid, The XV. Bookes of P. Ouidius Naso: Entitled Metamorphosis, trans. Arthur Golding (London: Iohn Danter 1593), sig. K8r. 49. Hamlet refers to Niobe when discussing Gertrude’s seemingly hasty remarriage at 1.2.145–9. See William Shakespeare, Hamlet, The Arden Shakespeare, Third Series, ed. A. Thompson and N. Taylor (London: Thomson Learning, 2006).

Notes to Pages 130–133

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50. Du Vair, The Holy Love, 374–5. 51. Du Vair, The Holy Love, 375. 52. See Jeremiah 5:6: “Wherefore a lyon out of the forest shall slay them, and a wolfe of the wildernesse shall destroy them: a leopard shall watch ouer their cities.” See also Du Vair: “thou knowest not o thou tygerlike & inhumane race, how God keepeth thee”; The Holy Loue, 376. 53. Later Titus says “It was my dear” (3.1.92), a moment that marks a shift into more abstract philosophising on Lavinia’s state. 54. Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, VI.i.30, 401–3. See too Skinner, Forensic Shakespeare, 168–9. 55. I agree with Crosbie that this is a scene of “extreme immoderation” but offer a more biblically oriented account of the “dissolution of boundaries” that he reads in relation to the Aristotelian mean. See C. Crosbie, “‘Fixing Moderation’: Titus Andronicus and the Aristotelian Determination of Value,” Shakespeare Quarterly 58.2 (2007): 147–73, esp. 162. See Lamentation 2:5 and 2:20 on God and the women of Jerusalem as consuming figures. 56. Udall, A Commentarie, 74, comments that “there is no outward thing so much cause of sorrowe, as the miseries laide upon our children in our sight.” See too Dod, Two Sermons, 22–3. 57. Dod, Two Sermons, 22. 58. For more on rhetoric and gender see Parker, Literary Fat Ladies, and Rebhorn, The Emperor, 136–58. 59. Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, XI.iii.14, 249–51. 60. Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, XI.iii.66–7, 279–81. 61. G. S. Aldrete, Gesture and Acclamation in Ancient Rome (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 6. 62. Tossanus, The Lamentations, 86. 63. Notably Titus asks Lavinia later on, “Shall we bite our tongues and in dumb shows / Pass the remainder of our hateful days?” (3.1.132–3). 64. For an early modern audience, Lavinia’s desire to hide would have been linked to her sexual shame. 65. A. Berlin, Lamentations: A Commentary (Louisville and London: Westminster John Knox Press, 2002), 48. On mourning and femininity, see K. Van Orden, “‘Female Complaintes’: Laments of Venus, Queens, and City Women in Late Sixteenth-Century France,” Renaissance Quarterly 54.3 (2001): 801–45, esp. 803. 66. Shakespeare often connects the image of the hunted deer with sex and death See E. Berry, Shakespeare and the Hunt: A Cultural and Social Study (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 81–6, 174. In a later play, The Winter’s Tale, Leontes concludes his imagining of Hermione and Polixines’s supposed guilt in this way: “And then to sigh, as ’twere /

264

67. 68.

69. 70.

71.

72.

73. 74. 75.

76.

77.

Notes to Pages 133–135 The mort o’ th’ deer” (1.2.117–18). The image plays with literal and figurative death, uneasily foreshadowing Leontes’s pathological treatment of his wife. On rhetoric and rape, see Rebhorn, The Emperors, 157–8. Some early modern biblical commentators link this blood with menstruation, while others interpret the passage more generally as a metaphor for sin. See Tossanus, The Lamentations, 22–3; Calvin, Commentaries, 320. Modern feminist biblical scholars, while acknowledging a possible reference to menstruation, argue that the stains are more likely a sign of sexual assault or of sexual immorality prior to the assault by the enemy. See O’Conner, Lamentations, 22–3. Berlin, Lamentations, 16. A. Hill, The Defence of the Article: Christ Descended into Hell (London: John Windet for William Ponsonbie, 1592), sig. B3v. See Du Vair, The Holy Loue, 359. Alexander Top, Saint Peters Rocke (London, 1597), 63. This idea may inform Titus’s later depiction of himself as failed mother and father to Lavinia because he cannot contain her grief (3.1.220–34) – Titus’s wife, the mother of his many children, is notably absent from the play. It is also worth noting that the “detested, dark, blood-drinking pit” (2.2.224) that Quintus and Martius fall into is gendered as a “swallowing womb” (2.2.239). See also Psalm 7:15. Ekphrastic enargia is often evoked in biblical commentaries on Lamentations. For example Tossanus, The Lamentations, sigs. B10r–B11v, writes, “Howe artificially the Prophet setteth before our eyes, the mourning and sorrowing euen of insensible creatures: liuely picturing out the miserie of the people.” On Lamentations, the image of the sea, and the impossibility of comparative language, see O’Conner, Lamentations, 38. Tossanus, The Lamentations, 21. The imagery of this speech may recall Jeremiah 9:1: “Oh, that my head were full of water, and mine eyes a fountain of teares, that I might weep day and night for the slaine of the daughter of my people.” See also the prayers in Chapters 35 and 36 of Saint Augustine, A right Christian Treatise, entitled S. Avgvstines Praiers, trans. Thomas Rogers (London, 1581), 162–84, which offer an interesting comparison with this scene. Tossanus, The Lamentations, 127. See also Du Vair, The Holy Loue, 385. In medieval and early modern iconography, Jeremiah is often depicted as seated in mourning, looking downwards. See R. Sanchez, Typology and Iconography in Donne, Herbert, and Milton: Fashioning the Self after Jeremiah (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 27. Du Vair, The Holy Loue, 384–5. Titus’s age is depicted in a number of ways, including his “silver hair” (3.1.261). By contrast, Calvin, in the Commentaries,

Notes to Pages 136–142

78.

79. 80.

81. 82.

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362, is suspicious of this behavior, writing of “acts of fruitless and abject lamentation” that have “no regard to God.” For a more positive reading of sympathy in this scene, see Meek, “O, What a Sympathy.” He sees the response of the Messenger to Titus’s plight as an example of comparative emotional response. On a possible source for this speech, see A. Streete, “Nashe, Shakespeare, and The Bishops’ Bible,” Notes and Queries 47.1 (2000): 56–8. Writing of Lamentations 1:20, Tossanus, The Lamentations, 39–40, says of the bowels: “According to the Hebrewe, [they] doe rise, or / swell, as wine that is troubled, worketh, or as the sea that boyleth and swelleth.” See Rebhorn, The Emperor, 143–8. The final verse returns to God’s rejection of and anger with Jerusalem (4:22).

8 The Acts of Pericles: Shakespeare’s Biblical Romance 1. For details of the printing history as well as the history of theories for why the printing was so poorly done, see S. Gossett’s introduction to the Arden Third Series Pericles (London: Thomson Learning, 2004), 10–38. 2. Since we still don’t know the exact nature of the collaboration, even if there is some consensus about Wilkins as co-author, I will refer to “Shakespeare” as the author of the play throughout, bearing in mind that he may not be solely responsible for every word or allusion. 3. For the references to Jonson, Lillo, and Steevens and Malone, see D. Skeele (ed.), Pericles: Critical Essays (New York: Garland Publishing, 2000), 34, 36, 38–50, 51. 4. P. Parker, “The Bible and the Marketplace: The Comedy of Errors,” in Shakespeare from the Margins: Language, Culture, Context (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 76, 82. 5. Twine and Gower are both cited from G. Bullough (ed.), Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, 8 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977), VI:471, 417. 6. As Shaheen notes, there are biblical references in Shakespeare’s sources: a few in Gower and twenty or so in Twine, by Shaheen’s count. Both versions of the Apollonius story are thus filtered through a Christian perspective, but none of Shakespeare’s (or Wilkins’) allusions are taken from Gower or Twine. See N. Shaheen, Biblical References in Shakespeare’s Plays (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1999), 683–7. 7. Pericles, 5.1.228. All citations from Pericles are from the Arden Third Series, edited by S. Gossett. 8. K. Smidt, Unconformities in Shakespeare’s Later Comedies (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993), 116, 123.

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Notes to Pages 142–144

9. F. E. Hart, “‘Great is Diana’ of Shakespeare’s Ephesus,” Studies in English Literature 43.2 (2003): 347–74. 10. Apuleius, The Golden Ass of Lucius Apuleius, trans. William Adlington (1566), cited in Hart, “Great is Diana,” 352–3. 11. C. Bicks, “Backsliding at Ephesus: Shakespeare’s Diana and the Churching of Women,” in D. Skeele (ed.), Pericles: Critical Essays, 205–27; “constellation of contradictions” at 207. 12. C. C. Relihan, “Liminal Geography: Pericles and the Politics of Place,” in A. Thorne (ed.), Shakespeare’s Romances (Houndsmills: Palgrave MacMillan, 2003), 72. 13. On the extent to which sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English men and women were “steeped” in the Bible, see my The Bible in Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), or, for the seventeenth-century, C. Hill, The English Bible and the Seventeenth-Century Revolution (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993). 14. The most famous and influential such reading is G. Wilson Knight, The Crown of Life (London: Methuen, 1948), but a similar approach is taken by F. D. Hoeniger in the second Arden edition of Pericles (London: Methuen, 1963, rpr. 1984), esp. lxxxviii–xci. 15. Gossett cites R. W. Dent, Shakespeare’s Proverbial Language: An Index (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981). Dent lists this as F311. 16. Michael Drayton, The Harmony of the Church (London, 1581), sig. C4r. John Hall, The Court of Virtue (London, 1565), fols. 70v–1v. 17. In Shakespeare’s Romance of the Word (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1990), 18–40, Maurice Hunt also examines the allusions to Jonah in Pericles, but his suggestion that Pericles’s responsibility to go to Ephesus and tell his story corresponds to Jonah’s to prophesy destruction to the Ninevites seems somewhat forced. 18. W. R. Elton, King Lear and the Gods (San Marino: The Huntington Library, 1966), 197–212. 19. Cited in Elton, King Lear and the Gods, 202, 204. 20. All biblical quotations are from The Geneva Bible: A Facsimile of the 1560 Edition (Peabody: Hendrickson, 2007; Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969). 21. See Gossett’s note to 2.1.1–4, for instance, in the Arden Pericles. 22. Citations from King Lear are from the Arden edition (Third Series), edited by R. A. Foakes (Walton-on-Thames: Thomas Nelson and Sons Ltd, 1997). 23. See Hamlin, Bible in Shakespeare, chapter 8. 24. S. Beckwith proposes that Pericles is in some sense a rewriting of King Lear; see Shakespeare and the Grammar of Forgiveness (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2011), 88. It is intriguing that Pericles and King Lear are the

Notes to Pages 144–148

25.

26.

27. 28. 29.

30.

31. 32.

33.

34.

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two Shakespeare plays recorded as being performed at Gowthwaite Hall, the Yorkshire home of the recusant Sir John Yorke. See P. Womack, “Shakespeare and the Sea of Stories,” Early Modern Studies 29.1 (1999): 180–1. Relihan, “Liminal Geography,” 75–6, who herself argues that Pericles is guilty both of “a lack of perceptiveness” about Antiochus and his daughter and the neglect of his responsibilities as ruler of Tyre, cites other critics (Knight, Howard Felperin, Cyrus Hoy) who see Pericles as guilty of one thing or another. But this seems partly the result of over-emphasizing a Christian reading of the play. If we think that playing tennis is beneath the dignity of the Christian god, we might remember Isaiah 22:18, “He will surely rolle and turne thee like a ball in a large countrey.” The allusion is noted by Shaheen, Biblical References, 691. H. Blumenberg, Shipwreck with Spectator: Paradigm of a Metaphor for Existence, trans. S. Rendall (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997). The Travels of Certain Englishmen (London, 1609), sigs. B2v–B3. G. M. MacLean argues that Lavender is a pseudonym of William Biddulph; see his The Rise of Oriental Travel: English Visitors to the Ottoman Empire, 1580–1720 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 55. For a superb history of the interpretation of Jonah, see Y. Sherwood, A Biblical Text and Its Afterlives: The Survival of Jonah in Western Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Shaheen, Biblical References, 693–4. As a biological child, Marina is “flesh and blood” to both her parents, but the traditional Book of Common Prayer wedding service also binds husband and wife together as (in the words of Adam from Gen. 2:24) “one flesh.” See Brian Cummings (ed.), The Book of Common Prayer 1559: The Texts of 1549, 1559, and 1662 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 162–3. Pericles alludes to both the Genesis passage and its citation in the wedding service at 5.3.43, “Look who kneels here: flesh of my flesh, Thaisa.” It is perhaps worth noting that if this good family is a version of the Trinity in bono, the incestuous family of Antiochus is a demonic parody of it, a Trinity in malo. As the riddle puts it, both father and daughter are strangely “trinitized” by their unnatural union: He’s father, son, and husband mild; / I mother, wife, and yet his child. / How they may be, and yet in two, / As you will live resolve it you” (1.1.69–72). Each is three in one, and together they are six who are “yet in two.” Pointed out by L. McJanet, “Genre and Geography: The Eastern Mediterranean in Pericles and The Comedy of Errors,” in J. Gillies and V. Mason Vaughan (eds.), Playing the Globe: Genre and Geography in

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35. 36. 37.

38. 39. 40.

41.

42. 43.

Notes to Pages 148–152 English Renaissance Drama (Madison and Teaneck: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1998), 87–8 and map on 89. See, for instance, the 1576 edition (STC 2118). N. Frye, The Secular Scripture: A Study in the Structure of Romance (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), 4. D. R. MacDonald, The Legend and the Apostle: The Battle for Paul in Story and Canon (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1983); A. M. Reimer, Miracle and Magic: A Study in the Acts of the Apostles and the Life of Apollonius of Tyana, Journal for the Study of the New Testament, Supplement Series 235 (London: Sheffield Academic Press, 2002); J. Perkins, “Space, Place, Voice in the Acts of the Martyrs and Greek Romance,” in D. R. MacDonald (ed.), Mimesis and Intertextuality in Antiquity and Christianity (Harrisburg: Trinity Press International, 2001), 117–37; S. P. and M. J. Schierling, “The Influence of the Ancient Romances on Acts of the Apostles,” Classical Bulletin 54.6 (1978): 81–8. Frye writes about the elements of Romance in the Acts of Thomas in The Secular Scripture, 156–7. See also C. Gesner, Shakespeare and the Greek Romance: A Study of Origins (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1970). Beckwith, Shakespeare and the Grammar of Forgiveness, 92. The Confessions of St. Augustine, trans. J. K. Ryan (Garden City: Image Books, 1960), 202. The passage from Paul is Romans 13:13–14. M. Murray, The Poetics of Conversion in Early Modern English Literature: Verse and Change from Donne to Dryden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 9–10. For Alabaster, see Murray, Poetics of Conversion, 47–51. For Donne, see K. Ettenhuber, Donne’s Augustine: Renaissance Cultures of Interpretation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). Critics such as Richard Strier (Murray cites also Anne Ferry and Paul Delany) have argued that, while Augustine was immensely influential in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, “the Confessions was not the Augustine that mattered”; see R. Strier, The Unrepentant Renaissance: From Petrarch to Shakespeare to Milton (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 208. Other works of Augustine were more widely read, but the Confessions clearly mattered to some, and the conversion story was very widely familiar. The Tolle, lege conversion experience is recounted, for example, by John Jewel (Certain Sermons, 1583), Edward Dering (A Sparing Restraint, 1568), and Gregory Martin in the annotations to Romans 13 in the Douai New Testament (1582). C. Davidson, “British Saint Play Records: Coping with Ambiguity,” Early Theatre 2 (1999): 97–106. P. Whitfield White, Drama and Religion in English Provincial Society, 1485–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

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44. D. C. Baker, J. L. Murphy, and L. B. Hall, Jr. (eds.), The Late Medieval Religious Plays of Bodleian MSS Digby 133 and E Museo 160 (Oxford: For the Early English Text Society by Oxford University Press, 1982). See also A. F. Johnston, “Olde playes or masques but Imperfect & little worthe,” The Yearbook of English Studies 43 (2013): 31–47. 45. H. Felperin, Shakespearian Romance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), 145–8. 46. Womack, “Sea of Stories,” 169. Womack cites F. D. Hoeninger (ed.), Pericles, Arden edition, Second Series (London: Methuen, 1963), xc. 47. Womack, “Sea of Stories,” 172. 48. B. Griffin writes that “The saint play is more closely allied to romance. Huge spans of time, far-flung wanderings, marvels, and recognitions are among its staples.” See his Playing the Past: Approaches to English Historical Drama, 1385–1600 (Woodbridge: D.S. Brewer, 2001), 33. Mercury appears in Jacques Gohory’s edition of Amadis de Gaule, for instance (where he is associated with music). See J. Brooks, “Music as Erotic Magic in a Renaissance Romance,” Renaissance Quarterly 60 (2007): 1207–56.

9 Finding Pygmalion in the Bible: Classical and Biblical Allusion in The Winter’s Tale 1. That Shakespeare might have composed his plays with readers as well as theatergoers in mind has been cogently suggested by L. Erne in Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) and Shakespeare and the Book Trade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). I do not find all of Erne’s arguments compelling, but I do find the general picture so. 2. Forman’s account is reproduced by a number of editors of The Winter’s Tale: S. Orgel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 233, and S. Snyder and D. T. Curren-Aquino (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 262. 3. There is no quarto of The Winter’s Tale. 4. There is a fine discussion of the theory in Snyder and Curren-Aquino, 63–6. Curren-Aquino notes that her coeditor (who died before the edition was completed) accepts the addition theory, while Curren-Aquino herself does not. 5. See G. Bullough (ed.), Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, 8 vols. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975), VIII:199. 6. Shakespeare’s devotion to Ovid, especially the Metamophoses, is welldocumented and studied. See, in particular, J. Bate, Shakespeare and Ovid (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), and A. B. Taylor Aquino (ed.), Shakespeare’s Ovid: the Metamorphoses in the Plays and Poems (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

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Notes to Pages 157–163

7. See Love’s Labor’s Lost, ed. A. Harbage (Baltimore: Penguin, 1973), 4.2.118–19. 8. See R. Strier, “Mind, Nature, Heterodoxy, and Iconoclasm in The Winter’s Tale,” Religion and Literature 47 (2016): 31–59, which treats the general religious issues in the play, and deals in detail with other critics and scholars. The present chapter hews strictly to the issue of biblical allusion, and attempts (as far as possible) not to engage with critical controversies. 9. All quotations from The Winter’s Tale are from the Arden edition by J. Pitcher (London: Methuen, 2010). 10. For a thoughtful treatment of this matter (and some disagreement with me), see P. Goldfarb Styrt, “Resistance Theory, Antigonus, and the Bear in The Winter’s Tale,” SEL 57 (2017): 389–406. 11. J. H. Pafford, in his edition of the play (London: Methuen, 1963), which is attentive to biblical references, cites the passage with a “Cf. also” (52); CurrenAquino (see note 2) says that it “may allude” (139); J. Pitcher in his edition (see note 9) states that it is “perhaps an allusion” (218); Orgel (see note 2) does not note the allusion, nor do the one-volume editions. 12. All passages from the Bible are from L. E. Berry (ed.), The Geneva Bible, A facsimile of the 1560 edition (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969). It is well-established that this was Shakespeare’s Bible. The “King James Version” came out too late (1611) for Shakespeare to have made use of it. 13. W. H. D. Rouse (ed.), Shakespeare’s Ovid: Arthur Golding’s Translation of the Metamorphoses (New York: Norton, 1966), X:304–6, 308; Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. F. J. Miller (Loeb Classical Library: Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1916), X:281. 14. Pafford’s edition makes it clear (quoting Theodore Spencer) that the island of Delos was regularly referred to as Delphos in the period, so there is no confusion or ignorance on Shakespeare’s part (54). 15. See D. Biggins, “‘Exit pursued by a Beare’: A Problem in The Winter’s Tale,” Shakespeare Quarterly 13 (1962): 3–13, and L. G. Clubb, “The Tragicomic Bear,” Comparative Literature Studies 9 (1972): 17–30. 16. Pafford, The Winter’s Tale, 69. 17. “The Mower against Gardens,” in N. Smith (ed.), The Poems of Andrew Marvell, rev. edn. (Harlow: Pearson Education, 2007), 13–14. 18. Ben Jonson, “Still to be Neat” (from The Silent Woman), l.11, in W. B. Hunter, Jr. (ed.), The Complete Poetry of Ben Jonson (New York: Norton, 1968). 19. For Elizabethan connections between women’s use of cosmetics and idolatry, see F. E. Dolan, “Taking the Pencil out of God’s Hand: Art, Nature, and the Face-Painting Debate in Early Modern England,” PMLA 108 (1993): 224–39, esp. 230 (though Dolan does not make this connection with regard to

Notes to Pages 163–168

20. 21.

22. 23.

24.

25.

26.

27.

28.

271

Perdita). See also T. Pollard, Drugs and Theater in Early Modern England (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), esp. chapter 3. The connection is made by Pafford, who is followed by Curren-Aquino (but not by Orgel or Pitcher). On virtuous disobedience in Shakespeare’s plays, see R. Strier, “Faithful Servants: Shakespeare’s Praise of Disobedience,” in H. Dubrow and R. Strier (eds.), The Historical Renaissance: New Essays in Tudor and Stuart Literature and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 104–33; expanded in R. Strier, Resistant Structures: Particularity, Radicalism, and Renaissance Texts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 165–202. For a good discussion of “How changed is Leontes?,” see Snyder and CurrenAquino, 41–7 (coming out on the positive side). Although the father–daughter reunion is not the final scene of Pericles, the father–daughter reunion (as T. S. Eliot’s “Marina” and much else testifies) is the emotional, poetic, and dramatic capstone of the play; it is presented in much greater length and detail than is the final scene in which Pericles is united with Thaisa, his long-lost wife. For the history (and mythology) of erotic advances to statues, see L. Nead, The Female Nude: Art, Obscenity and Sexuality (London: Routledge, 1992), 87. For the relevance of this to the play, see S. Orgel, “The Pornographic Ideal,” Imagining Shakespeare: A History of Texts and Visions (Hampshire: Palgrave MacMillan, 2003), 112–43. In Greene’s Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, Friar Bacon has “framed out” a brazen head that will speak “by the enchanting forces of the devil” (xi:20). See the text of Greene’s play in C. Read Baskerville, V. B. Heltzel, and A. H. Nethercot (eds.), Elizabethan and Stuart Plays (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1962). See, inter alia, G. Rupp, Patterns of Reformation (London: Epworth Press, 1969); C. M. N. Eire, War Against the Idols: The Reformation of Worship from Erasmus to Calvin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). See J. Griffiths (ed.), Book of Homilies (Vancouver: Regent College Publishing, 2008), 167–278.This edition is a reprint of The Two Books of Homilies Appointed to be Read in Churches (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1859). For further development of this point, see the essay by Strier cited in note 8, which builds on H. Diehl, “‘Strike All that Look upon with Marvel’: Theatrical and Theological Wonder in The Winter’s Tale,” in B. Reynolds and W. N. West (eds.), Rematerializing Shakespeare: Authority and Representation on the Early Modern English Stage (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 19–34.

272

Notes to Pages 171–174

10 Shylock in the Lion’s Den: Enacting Exegesis in The Merchant of Venice 1. William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, ed. B. Raffel (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 4.1.210; 221–2. All citations will appear in the text hereafter. 2. All biblical references throughout this chapter refer to the 1599 Geneva Bible unless otherwise specified: The Bible, That Is, The Holy Scriptures (London, 1599). 3. B. Kiefer Lewalski, “Biblical Allusion and Allegory in The Merchant of Venice,” Shakespeare Quarterly 13.3 (1962): 327–43. 4. T. Luxon, “A Second Daniel: The Jew and the ‘True Jew’ in The Merchant of Venice,” Early Modern Literary Studies 4.3 (1999): §§1–37. http://extra.shu.ac .uk/emls/04-3/luxoshak.html. 5. J. Adelman, Blood Relations: Christian and Jew in The Merchant of Venice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 12. 6. On the role Christological hermeneutics played in the phenomena of antiSemitism see R. Ruether’s Faith and Fratricide: The Theological Roots of AntiSemitism (New York: Saebury Press, 1974). Rather than beginning her investigation with Paul and the early church fathers like most Anglo-Jewish historians, Ruether traces the anti-Semetic impulse back to exegetical disputes over several Old Testament prophetic books. After identifying critical passages from Isaiah (especially 42:52–3), Daniel, and the Psalms, Ruether claims the disciples set out to “renew Jesus’s messianic mission to Israel,” encouraged by their conviction that priests and rabbis had never truly understood the words of God and that the possessors of the New Covenant held exclusive hermeneutic authority (73). 7. Chapters 1:1–2:4 and chapters 8–12 of Daniel are in Hebrew, while 2:4–7:28 are in Aramaic. Although the linguistic changes from Hebrew to Aramaic do not conform to any narrative pattern based on content or chronology, historians do not doubt the literary unity of the text. The linguistic difference may likely be the result of the book being written in separate scrolls in different languages, and the Men of the Great Synagogue assembled the text based on the documents they found. For an account of the status of Daniel in the biblical canon, see A. Cohen’s introduction to Daniel, Ezra, Nehemiah, ed. A Cohen (New York: Soncino Press, 1985). 8. The first six chapters of the biblical text, rather conventionally, provide stories about Daniel in the third person, with the exception of chapter four which is written in the first-person with Nebuchadnezzar narrating. The book then switches narrative voice again to present Daniel’s revelations about the future in first person in the remaining six chapters. Biblical scholars corroborate the division of the book by noting that the chronology of the text follows the sequence of chapters one through six set during the reigns of Nebuchadnezzar,

Notes to Pages 174–177

9. 10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15. 16. 17.

18.

19.

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Belshazzar, and Darius of Media respectively, while chapters seven through twelve return to Belshazzar’s reign, followed by Darius, and Cyrus of Persia. B. Batra in Babylonian Talmud, Seder Nezikin (New York: Artscroll, 1997), 14b–15a. For more on the composition and editorial history of Daniel see J. Collins’s Daniel: With an Introduction to Apocalyptic Literature (Grand Rapids: W. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1984). See K. Young, The Drama of the Medieval Church, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1933), I:125–7. D. Bevington (ed.), “Danielis Ludus,” in Medieval Drama (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975). The Annals of English Drama (London: Routledge, 1989) records four plays based on the events cataloged in the Book of Daniel in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: King Darius (1565); The Tragedy of King Darius (1603); Daniel in the Lions’ Den (1604); and Darius King of Persia by J. Crowne (1688). F. Ardolino, “‘Now Shall I See the Fall of Babylon’: The Spanish Tragedy as a Reformation Play of Daniel,” Renaissance and Reformation / Renaissance et Reforme 26.1 (1990): 49–55, esp. 51. Italics are mine. Martin Luther, “An Appeal to the Ruling Class of German Nationality as to the Amelioration of the State of Christendom,” in Martin Luther: Selections from His Writings, ed. J. Dillenberger (New York: Anchor, 1961), 478–9. George Joye, The exposicion of Daniel the Prophete (Geneva, 1545), fol. 25r. 110v. Italics are mine. Lewalski, “Biblical Allusions,” 340; James Shapiro, Shakespeare and the Jews (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 134. In the 1560 Geneva Bible, the episode is on folio 448, called “The History of Susanna, which some joyne to the end of Daniel, and make it the 13. chap,” while The Bishops’ Bible of 1568 calls it “The Story of Susanna.” Several scholars note Shakespeare’s fascination with the Apocrypha. As John Gross points out, Shakespeare named his own daughters after two names found therein – Susannah and Judith. See J. Gross, Shylock: Legend and Its Legacy (New York: Touchstone, 1994), 96. Jerome, Jerome’s Commentary on Daniel, trans. G. L. Archer, Jr. (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1958), 21. Jerome traces this practice back to Pharaoh in Egypt: “It was not only the overseer or master of the eunuchs ... who changed the names of saints, but also Pharaoh called Joseph in Egypt (Gen. 41) (F) Somtonphanec [Heb.: Zaphenath-paaneah], for neither of them wished them to have Jewish names in the land of captivity. Wherefore the prophet says in the Psalm: ‘How shall we sing the Lord’s praise in a strange land?’ (Ps. 136:4)” (21). J. Reinhard Lupton, Citizen-Saints: Shakespeare and Political Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2005), 229 n. 20.

274

Notes to Pages 177–184

20. Gross, Shylock, 63. 21. In Daniel chapter 6, a group of governors grow jealous of King Darius’s preferment of Daniel and conspire against him. They persuade Darius “to establish a statute, that whosoever shall ask a petition of any god or man for thirty days save of thee, O King, he shall be cast into the den of lions,” knowing that the Jew would violate this new law of the land to fulfill his Mosaic obligation to pray three times daily to his God (Daniel 6:7). 22. Lupton, Citizen-Saints, 92, connects Portia’s “jot of blood” to Christ’s proclamation in the Sermon on the Mount that “till heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the law until it is all accomplished” (Matthew 5:17–18). Lupton argues that Jesus’s Greek iota [ι] and Portia’s “jot,” both modeled on the smallest Hebrew letter yohd [‫]י‬, signify their attentiveness to even the minutest detail of the law. 23. Jerome, Commentary on Daniel, 15. 24. Ruether, Faith and Fratricide, 252–4. 25. Aristotle, Aristotle’s Poetics, trans. G. Whalley, eds. J. Baxter and P. Atherton (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997), 57. 26. V. Silver, “A Matter of Interpretation” Critical Inquiry 20.1 (1993): 167. 27. See H. Hamlin’s Psalm Culture in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 6. As Hamlin demonstrates, “songs” from the Book of Psalms and those found elsewhere in the Bible would have been undistinguishable to the early modern ear. 28. John Calvin, “Preface,” in Commentaries on the Prophet Daniel, trans. T. Myers (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1852), 79. 29. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica Part II, Vol. 2 (New York: Benziger Brothers, 1922). Aquinas argues, “[p]roportionate repayment belongs to communicative justice, when it answers to the legal due; for instance, when it is contracted that so much be paid for so much” (46–7). 30. Aquinas, Summa Theologica, 47. 31. See P. Platt, “Christian Paradoxes,” Shakespeare and the Culture of Paradox (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 34–55. For more on the paradoxical foundations of Christianity, especially the doctrine of the Trinity, see R. W. Hepburn’s Christianity and Paradox (New York: Pegasus, 1968). J. Knapp also offers a reading of Erasmus’s encounter with Christian paradoxes in Shakespeare’s Tribe: Church, Nation, and Theater in Renaissance England (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2002). 32. See V. Silver’s reading of Milton’s “debt immense of endless gratitude” in Paradise Lost in Imperfect Sense: The Predicament of Milton’s Irony (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 244–8.

Notes to Pages 184–189

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33. M. Luther, “That Jesus Christ Was Born a Jew,” Luther’s Works, vol. 45, ed. Walther I. Brandt (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1971), 201, cited in Adelman, Blood Relations, 26. 34. H. Bloom, “An Essay by Harold Bloom,” in William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, ed. B. Raffel (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 153–6. 35. A. Botwinick, “Shakespeare in Advance of Hobbes: Pathways to the Modernization of the European Psyche as Charted in The Merchant of Venice,” Telos 153 (2011): 132–59. 36. Hugh Broughton, Daniel His Chaldie Visions and His Ebrevv (London, 1596), sig. Aiiiir.

11 Maimed Rites and Whirling Words in Hamlet 1. John Donne, John Donne, ed. J. Carey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 30 (lines 77–9). On the connections between Donne’s Satire and Hamlet, see T. Fulton, “Hamlet’s Inky Cloak and Donne’s Satyres,” The John Donne Journal 20 (2001): 71–106. 2. P. Lake, “Religious Identities in Shakespeare’s England” in D. S. Kastan (ed.), A Companion to Shakespeare (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 57–84. 3. L. I. Guiney, Recusant Poets: With a Selection from their Work (London: Sheed & Ward, 1938), 355. 4. M. Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” in Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, trans. and ed. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1946), 129–56, esp. 139. 5. Harold Jenkins (ed.), Hamlet (London: Methuen, 1982), 1.2.135; 1.5.196. Quotations from plays other than Hamlet are from D. Bevington (ed.), The Complete Works of Shakespeare, 5th edn. (New York: Pearson Longman, 2004). All subsequent Shakespeare citations appear in the text. 6. Pertinent scholarship includes S. Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002); R. Frye, The Renaissance Hamlet (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984); B. Cummings, Mortal Thoughts: Religion, Secularity and Identity in Shakespeare and Early Modern Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 207–35; R. Targoff, Common Prayer (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2001). 7. C. Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 211. 8. Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory, 238. 9. Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory, 247. 10. Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory, 208.

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Notes to Pages 189–193

11. On the secular and Hamlet, see P. Stevens, “Hamlet, Henry VIII, and the Question of Religion: A Post-secular Perspective,” in D. Loewenstein and M. Witmore (eds.), Shakespeare and Early Modern Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 231–58. 12. I use “post-Reformation” to indicate that the process of reformation was slow and uneven, not the quick triumphant establishment of a Protestant culture. At the same time, “post-Reformation” recognizes that something happened, that over the course of the mid-sixteenth century political and religious changes transformed the cultural and social landscape. While this process did not effect a clean break, for all that it remains a watershed. 13. The Geneva Bible: A facsimile of the 1560 edition (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1969). Subsequent citations come from this edition. 14. Geneva Bible, sig. 3*2v. 15. C. Haigh, The English Reformation Revised (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 7. See also E. Duffy, “The Godly and the Multitude in Stuart England,” The Seventeenth Century 1 (1986): 31–55. 16. James Simpson, Burning to Read: English Fundamentalism and Its Reformation Opponents (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). 17. Certain Sermons or Homilies (1547) and A Homily against Disobedience and Wilful Rebellion (1570): A Critical Edition, ed. R. B. Bond (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987), 62. 18. For a critique of the historiographical consequences of Weber, see A. Hunt, “The Lord’s Supper in Early Modern England,” Past and Present 161.1 (1998): 39–83. 19. Thomas Cooper, Certaine sermons vvherin is contained the defense of the gospell nowe preached (London, 1580), sig. G2r. 20. S. Bos, M. Lange-Meyers, and J. Six, “Sidney’s Funeral Portrayed,” in J. van Dorsten et al. (eds.), Sir Philip Sidney: 1586 and the Creation of a Legend (Leiden: Leiden, Brill, 1986), 38–61. 21. Frye, The Renaissance Hamlet, 150. 22. M. MacDonald, “Ophelia’s Maimed Rites,” Shakespeare Quarterly 37.3 (1986): 316. 23. I have in mind Bourdieu’s sense of ritual as not primarily about the communication of messages about social order. C. Bell, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), writes, “Ritual is a tool for social and cultural jockeying; it is a performative medium for the negotiation of power in relationships” (79). Earlier she explains that “This orchestration is not a perfect holistic order imposed on minds and bodies but a delicate and continual renegotiation of provisional distinctions and integrations so as to avoid encountering in practice the discrepancies and conflicts that would become so apparent if the whole were obvious” (28).

Notes to Pages 194–198

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24. See S. Greenblatt, “The Mousetrap,” in S. Greenblatt and C. Gallagher (eds.), Practicing New Historicism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 136–62; H. R. Coursen, Jr., Christian Ritual and the World of Shakespeare’s Tragedies (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1976); J. V. Holleran, “Maimed Funeral Rites in Hamlet,” English Literary Renaissance 19:1 (1989): 65–93; M. S. Sweetnam, “Hamlet and the Reformation of the Eucharist,” Literature & Theology 21 (2007): 11–28; and S. Greenblatt, “Remnants of the Sacred in Early Modern England,” in M. de Grazia, M. Quilligan, and P. Stallybrass (eds.), Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 337–45. 25. Jenkins, Hamlet, 220. 26. Thomas More, The Complete Works of St. Thomas More, ed. J. B. Trapp, vol. 9 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 14, 30. 27. H. C. Porter, “Nose of Wax: Scripture and the Spirit from Erasmus to Milton,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 14 (1964): 155–74. 28. William Charke, An answeare for the time, vnto that foule, and wicked Defence of the censure, that was giuen vpon M. Charkes booke (London, 1583), 8r. 29. Thomas Cooper, Certaine sermons vvherin is contained the defense of the gospell nowe preached (London, 1580), 26. 30. Thomas Whitgift, The defense of the aunsvvere to the Admonition (London, 1574), 629. 31. Richard Hooker, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, ed. A. S. McGrade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 112. 32. S. Beckwith, Shakespeare and the Grammar of Forgiveness (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011), 4 passim, provides an account of the secularization of language in post-Reformation England that resonates deeply with Hamlet’s accusation. 33. Henry Smith, The sermons of Maister Henrie Smith gathered into one volume (London, 1593), 539. 34. J. Bossy, “Moral Arithmetic: Seven Sins into Ten Commandments,” in E. Leites (ed.), Conscience and Casuistry in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 228; see, more broadly, 214–34. 35. M. Aston, England’s Iconoclasts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 362. Aston remarks “There is enough surviving evidence for one to be fairly sure that the majority of churches complied with the ecclesiastical requirement for the display of these texts, though as late as 1605 churchwardens excused their lack of the ten commandments on the grounds that ‘we have had no commandment to provide them before this time’.” 36. The text of this passage shows significant variation. Q2 reads: “we defie augury, there is special prouidence in the fall of a Sparrowe, if it be, tis not to come, if it be not to come, it will be now, if it be not now, yet it well come, the readines is

278

37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49.

50.

51.

52.

53.

Notes to Pages 198–201 all, since no man of ought he leaues, knows what ist to leaue betimes, let be” (sig. N3v). F reads: “we defie Augury; there’s a special Prouidence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ’tis not to come: if it bee not to come, it will bee now: if it be now; yet it will come; the readinesse is all, since no man ha’s ought of what he leaues. What is’t to leaue betimes?” (sig. 2p6v). A. C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy (New York: Fawcett Premier Books, 1965), 123. D. Daniell, The Bible in English (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 383. A. Sinfield, “Hamlet’s Special Providence,” Shakespeare Survey 33 (1980): 95; see, more broadly, 89–97. Sinfield, “Hamlet’s Special Providence,” 97. Sinfield, “Hamlet’s Special Providence,” 97. Sinfield, “Hamlet’s Special Providence,” 97. Sinfield, “Hamlet’s Special Providence,” 95. E. Fernie, “The Last Act: Presentism, Spirituality and the Politics of Hamlet,” in E. Fernie (ed.), Spiritual Shakespeares (London: Routledge, 2005), 205. Fernie, “The Last Act,” 205, 204, 206, 209. P. Spinrad, “The Fall of the Sparrow and the Map of Hamlet’s Mind,” Modern Philology 102 (2005): 453–77. A. Walsham, Providence in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 10. Cumming, Mortal Thoughts, 213, observes that “Hamlet’s gloss of the verse ... is Calvinist in language.” C. Methuen, “Special Providence and Sixteenth-Century Astronomical Observation: Some Preliminary Reflections,” Early Science and Medicine 4 (1999): 99–113. Edmund Bunny, A booke of Christian exercise appertaining to resolution, that is, shewing how that we should resolve our selves to become Christians indeed: by R.P. Perused, and accompanied now with a treatise tending to pacification: by Edm. Bunny (London, 1584), 244. Robert Parsons, The first booke of the Christian exercise appertayning to resolution (Rouen, 1582), 263. R. McNulty, “The Protestant Version of Robert Parsons’s The First Booke of the Christian Exercise,” Huntington Library Quarterly 22 (1959): 271–300, points out that Bunny was especially careful to cut instances of perhaps, haply, perchance, and fortunately. William Perkins, A golden chaine: or The description of theologie containing the order of the causes of saluation and damnation, according to Gods word (Cambridge, 1600), 904–5. R. T. Kendall, Calvin and English Calvinism to 1649 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979). Kendall uses the phrase to describe Perkins and his

Notes to Pages 201–206

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followers, who, in his assessment, promote a version of Calvinism that is at some distance from the views of Calvin himself. 54. Perkins, A golden chaine, 793. “The way of dying well” is the running header of this section. 55. Perkins, A golden chaine, 797, 803. 56. N. Shaheen, Biblical References in Shakespeare’s Plays (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1987), 112. Shaheen points to Psalm 115:17: “The dead praise not the Lord, nether anie that go downe into the place of silence” and 2 Esdras 7:32: “Then the earth shal restore those, that haue slept in her, and so shal the dust those that dwell therein in silence.”

12 Political Theology from the Pulpit and the Stage: Sir Thomas More, Richard II, and Henry V 1. J. Jowett (ed.), Sir Thomas More (London: Methuen, 2011), title page; all subsequent quotations of the play are to this edition and appear in the text by scene and line number. 2. Recent work includes L. Manley and S. MacLean, Lord Strange’s Men and Their Plays (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 113–22, passim; K. M. S. Bezio, Staging Power in Tudor and Stuart English History Plays (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), 132–5; D. Hamilton, Anthony Munday and the Catholics (Burlington: Ashgate, 2005), 119–26; G. Iopollo, Dramatists and their Manuscripts in the Age of Shakespeare, Jonson, Middleton and Heywood (London: Routledge, 2006), 102; B. Lockey, Early Modern Catholics, Royalists, and Cosmopolitans (Burlington: Ashgate, 2015); W. Long, “The Occasion of The Book of Sir Thomas More,” in T. H. Howard-Hill (ed.), Shakespeare and Sir Thomas More: Essays on the Play and Its Shakespearean Interest (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 45–56. 3. Jowett, Sir Thomas More, 139. 4. This is apparent, for example, in the difference between the G. B. Evans and J. J. M. Tobin (eds.), Riverside Shakespeare, 2nd edn. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997), which contains only the passages attributed to Shakespeare, and the S. Wells, G. Taylor, J. Jowett, and W. Montgomery (eds.), Oxford Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), which contains the whole play. 5. John Knox, The first blast of the trumpet against the monstruous regiment of women (Geneva, 1558). 6. Christopher Goodman, How superior powers oght to be obeyd (Geneva, 1558), 52. Biblical quotation from William Whittingham, Nevve Testament of our Lord Iesus Christ (Geneva, 1557), which was modified for the 1560 Geneva Bible that appeared soon after Queen Elizabeth ascended the throne. For the 1560

280

7.

8. 9.

10.

11. 12. 13. 14.

15.

16.

17. 18. 19. 20.

Notes to Pages 207–211 translation, which would become standard, the wording of 1 Corinthians is a bit less radical: “ought to be subject,” rather than commanded, and “Church” rather than Tyndale’s radical “congregation.” On the relationships between these early Bibles and the resistance tracts, see T. Fulton, “Toward a New Cultural History of the Geneva Bible,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 47.3 (2017): 487–516. This note is added after 1560 – in 1576, and many later printings – to the editions with annotations attributed in the New Testament to Camerarius, Loseler, and Villerius (and Junius for Revelation); Bible: that is, The Holy Scriptures conteined in the Olde and New Testaments (London, 1595, 1599), fol. 67v. Hugh Latimer, Selected Sermons of Hugh Latimer, ed. A. G. Chester (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1968), 101. Calculated by checking the references in N. Shaheen’s Biblical References in Shakespeare’s Plays (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1987); a few references suggested here are not in Shaheen. T. Fulton, “Shakespeare’s Everyman: Measure for Measure and English Fundamentalism,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 40.1 (2010): 119–47. R. Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 133–4. The New Testament of Jesus Christ (Rheims, 1582), facsimile, ed. by D. M. Rogers (London: The Scolar Press, 1975), 416. The Two Books of Homilies Appointed to be Read in Churches (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1859), 552. William Tyndale, Obedience of a Christian Man, ed. D. Daniell (London: Penguin, 2000), 36–59, where Tyndale provides a block quotation and a long reading of Romans 13. For discussion, see T. Fulton, “The Politics of Renaissance Historicism: Valla, Erasmus, Colet, and More,” in A. Baynes Coiro and T. Fulton (eds.), Rethinking Historicism from Shakespeare to Milton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 87–112. The two following paragraphs derive from this article. The Collected Works of Erasmus (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974–), LXI:347 (hereafter CWE); the original is Erasmus, Annotationes (1516), 448. Erasmus, CWE LXI:352–3; Annotationes (1516), 448–9. K. Eden, “Equity and the Origins of Renaissance Historicism: The Case for Erasmus,” Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities 5.1 (1993): 137–45, esp. 138. Erasmus, CWE, XXVII:235–6; Latin in Opera Omnia Des. Erasmi Roterodami Amsterdam, 1969-), vol. IV, part 1, 166. Erasmus’s 1527 edition prints the Vulgate and Erasmus’s translation in facing columns; Novum Testamentum (Basel, 1527), 338.

Notes to Pages 211–216

281

21. Biblia, the Byble, that is, the Holy Scrypture of the Olde and New Testament ([Cologne?], 1535), Romans 13a. 22. Biblia, the Byble (1535), sig. *2v. 23. From Martin Luther, “An Open Letter to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation Concerning the Reform of the Christian Estate,” in Works of Luther, 6 vols., ed. H. Jacobs (Philadelphia: A.J. Holman Co, 1915–43), II:71; see also 69, 70, 108–9. 24. Bible: that is, The Holy Scriptures conteined in the Olde and New Testaments (London, 1595, 1599), fol. 67v. 25. John Foxe, et al., The First (Second) Volume of the Ecclesiasticall History, Contaynyng the Actes and Monumentes of Martyrs (London, 1570), II:1201. 26. Unless otherwise noted, all Shakespearean references are to Riverside Shakespeare. 27. In the Institution of Christian Religion, Calvin translates Romans 13:4 with “magistratui”; Calvin, Institutio Christianae Religionis (Geneva, 1609), fol. 308v (Book 4, chapter 20, 19). 28. John Calvin, The Institution of Christian Religion (London, 1634), 748. The translation and the marginalia appears in older editions, such as The Institution of Christian Religion, written in Latine by M. John Calvine, trans. Thomas Norton (London, 1587); for the Latin, see Calvin, Institutio Christianae Religionis, fol. 311r (Book 4, chapter 20, 19). 29. John Donne, The Satires, Epigrams, and Verse Letters, ed W. Milgate (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), lines 109–10; 89–92. 30. John Donne, John Donne: Selected Prose, eds. E. M. Simpson, H. Gardner, and T. Healy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), 111. 31. J. H. Walter makes the case for Erasmus in Henry V, New Arden Edition (London: Methuen, 1954), xvii–iii. A. Gurr, “Henry V and the Bees’ Commonwealth,” Shakespeare Survey 30 (1977): 61–72; see also J. Spencer, “Princes, Pirates, and Pigs: Criminalizing Wars of Conquest in Henry V,” Shakespeare Quarterly 47.2 (1996): 160–177; S. Marx, “Shakespeare’s Pacificism,” Renaissance Quarterly 45.1 (1992): 49–95. 32. Shakespeare draws on Holinshed’s Chronicles (1587); see G. Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare (New York: Columbia University Press 1962), 4:379. 33. John Jewel, A Defence of the Apologie of the Churche of Englande (London: 1567), 389. 34. John Knox, The Political Writings of John Knox, ed. M. A. Breslow (London: Associated University Presses, 1985), 65, passim. 35. Thomas Fuller, The Church-History of Britain (London, 1656), book 8, 36. 36. Jewel, A Defence of the Apologie of the Churche of Englande, 389.

282

Notes to Pages 216–219

37. C. McEachern, “Henry V and the Paradox of the Body Politic,” Shakespeare Quarterly 45.1 (1994): 33–56; esp. 48–56, K. Bezio, “Personating Leadership: Shakespeare’s Henry V and Performative Negotiation,” Leadership and the Humanities 1.1 (2013): 43–56. For the royal audience of 2 Henry IV, see J. Shapiro, 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare (London: Faber and Faber, 2005), 39. 38. Pierre Du Moulin the younger, A Letter of a French Protestant to a Scotishman of the Covenant (London, 1640), 37; quoted by J. P. Sommerville, Thomas Hobbes: Political Ideas in Historical Context (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992), 88. 39. See J. S. Mebane, “‘Impious War’: Religion and the Ideology of Warfare in Henry V,” Studies in Philology 104.2 (2007): 250–66, esp. 257–8. 40. Gurr, “Henry V and the Bees’ Commonwealth,” 66; see also A. Patterson, Shakespeare and the Popular Voice (Cambridge: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 73–81, and P. C. Herman, “‘O, ’tis a gallant king’: Shakespeare’s Henry V and the Crisis of the 1590s,” in D. Hoak (ed.), Tudor Political Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 208; see Herman’s bibliography of the debate over the political orientation of Henry V, 206, passim. 41. J. Kearney, The Incarnate Text: Imagining the Book in Reformation England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 113–19. 42. See also Isaiah 2:7; for further discussion, see Fulton, “Toward a New Cultural History of the Geneva Bible,” 505. 43. V. Kahn, “Political Theology and Reason of State in Samson Agonistes,” South Atlantic Quarterly 95.4 (1996): 1065–97, and V. Kahn, The Future of Illusion: Political Theology and Early Modern Texts (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2013); see also G. Hammill, The Mosaic Constitution: Political Theology and Imagination from Machiavelli to Milton (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012); D. Kuller Shuger, Political Theologies in Shakespeare’s England: The Sacred and the State in Measure for Measure (New York: Palgrave, 2001); and J. Reinhard Lupton, Citizen-Saints: Shakespeare and Political Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). 44. Kahn, Future of Illusion, 12. 45. C. Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. G. Schwab (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988; originally published in 1922, revised 1934). 46. Schmitt, Political Theology, 36. 47. For a similar use of the term see, for example, T. Kirby, The Zurich Connection and Tudor Political Theology (Leiden: Brill, 2007). 48. J. Louth, The Reminiscences of John Loude or Louthe in Narratives of the Days of the Reformation, ed. J. Gough Nichols (Westminster: Camden Society, 1859), 56; quoted and discussed in S. M. Felch and C. Costley King’oo, “Reading

Notes to Pages 219–223

49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54.

55.

283

Tyndale’s Obedience in Whole and in Part,” Reformation 21.2 (2016): 86–111, esp. 87. H. Höpfl (ed.), Luther and Calvin on Secular Authority (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), xliii, xxiii. J. Reinhard Lupton and G. Hammill (eds.), Political Theology and Early Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 1. Lupton and Hammill (eds.), Political Theology, 2. See Kahn, Future of Illusion, 5 n. 11. On Schmitt’s distinctions between Catholic and modern political thinking, for example, see Kahn, Future of Illusion, 29–30. Notable in this rethinking is J. Simpson’s Burning to Read: English Fundamentalism and its Reformation Opponents (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). See K. Killeen, The Political Bible in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016).

Afterword: Shakespeare’s Biblical Virtues 1. See H. Hamlin, The Bible in Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 2. The forty-eight middot are compiled in Pirkei Avot (Ethics of the Fathers) 6:6, the shortest and most accessible tractate of the Mishnah. See P. Blackman (ed.), Tractate Avot (Gateshead: ArtScroll/Judaica Press, 1964), 93–4. The transliterations are taken from “Study the 48 Middot,” www.reformjudaism .org/study-48-middot. Pirkei Avot uses the term ma’alot (steps, virtues, qualities). 3. See G. Kennedy, Classical Rhetoric and Its Christian and Secular Tradition from Ancient to Modern Times (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), and J. P. Sampley and P. Lampe (eds.), Paul and Rhetoric (London: Continuum, 2010). 4. See Fulton and Poole, Introduction: 11, and T. Fulton, “Political Theology from the Pulpit and the Stage,” Chapter 12: 204. 5. S. Trapedo, “Shylock in the Lion’s Den: Enacting Exegesis in The Merchant of Venice,” Chapter 10: 180. 6. Poole, “Words of Diverse Significations: Hamlet’s Puns, Amphibology, and Allegorical Hermeneutics,” Chapter 4: 73. 7. Zysk, “John 6, Measure for Measure, and the Complexities of the Literal Sense,” Chapter 3: 55, citing T. Fulton, “Shakespeare’s Everyman,” 125. 8. Poole, Chapter 4: 71. 9. Bishop, “Discontented Harmonies: Words against Words in Pomfret Castle,” Chapter 6: 109.

284

Notes to Pages 224–228

10. Lander, “Maimed Rites and Whirling Words in Hamlet,” Chapter 11: 191. 11. Groves, “England’s Jerusalem in Shakespeare’s Henriad,” Chapter 5: 88. 12. On place and place-making in the Reformation, see A. Walsham, The Reformation of the Landscape: Religion, Identity, and Memory in Early Modern Britain and Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 13. Hamlin, “The Acts of Pericles: Shakespeare’s Biblical Romance,” Chapter 8: 140–155. 14. On tolerance versus hospitality as virtues on the pluralist Renaissance stage, I have learned from my student, S. Kian Kaufman, The Hospitable Globe: Persia and the Early Modern English Stage, dissertation at the University of California, Irvine, 2016. 15. S. B. Noegel and B. M. Wheeler, The A to Z of Prophets in Islam and Judaism (Lanham: Scarecrow Press, 2010), 173–4. 16. Gordon, “The Bible in Transition in the Age of Shakespeare: A European Perspective,” Chapter 1: 17–32. 17. T. Betteridge, “Writing Faithfully in a Post-Confessional World,” in A. J. Power and R. Loughnane (eds.), Late Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 225–42. 18. H. Arendt, Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957), 243. 19. On the phrase “walk in the ways” in Biblical and liturgical contexts, see D. Swift, Shakespeare’s Common Prayers: The Book of Common Prayer and Elizabethan Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 38–40. 20. Trapedo, Chapter 10: 180. 21. Hamlin, Chapter 5: 147. 22. Bishop, Chapter 6: 105. 23. Gordon, Chapter 1: 23. 24. Trapedo, Chapter 10: 182. For another approach to Shakespeare and wisdom literature, see M. Witmore, “Shakespeare and Wisdom Literature,” in D. Loewenstein and M. Witmore (eds.), Shakespeare and Early Modern Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 191–213. 25. Poole, “Words of Diverse Significations,” Chapter 4: 76, citing John King, Lectures upon Jonas, 293. 26. U. Simon (ed.), Jonah: JPS Bible Commentary (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1999), vii, xxxiii. 27. Hamlin, Chapter 8: 154. 28. On metanoia and teshuvah, see C. F. Alford, Trauma and Forgiveness: Consequences and Communities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 97–100. 29. Cited in Poole, Chapter 4: 76.

Index

Abraham (biblical figure), 77, 176, 178 Adam (biblical figure), 77, 197–98, 267n32 Adamczyk, Magdalena, 70–71, 248n10 Adelman, Janet, 172–73, 184 Alabaster, William, 152 Al-bassam, Sulayman, 199 Aldrete, Gregory S., 132 allegorical interpretation, 70, 71, 72, 74, 248n17. See also literal and figurative/allegorical interpretation All’s Well That Ends Well (Shakespeare), 186 allusion, biblical. See biblical allusion Altieri, Joanne, 73, 249n26 Ammonius of Alexandria, 109 amphibology, 74–75, 78–79, 80 Anabaptism, 198 anaphora, 126, 261n33 ancient languages, 18, 20, 21–24. See also specific ancient languages Andrewes, Lancelot, 73–74, 260n8 animation/reanimation, in The Winter’s Tale (Shakespeare), 156–57, 159–61, 162, 166–67, 271n25 annotations. See also paratextual aids; and under specific Bibles biblical printers and, 29–30, 31, 38, 41, 44–46, 242–43n49 Eucharistic controversy and, 53, 54, 57–59, 60, 61, 62, 244n9 in Geneva Bibles, 4, 17, 20, 29, 30, 45–46, 61, 89–90, 104, 113, 159, 176, 207, 211, 244n9, 246n39, 280n7 Protestantism and, 45–46 by readers, 89–90 reading Scripture and, 3 Annotations on the New Testament (Erasmus), 18, 208, 209–10 Anshei Knesset HaGadola (Men of the Great Synagogue), 174, 272n7 anti-Semitism, 173, 179, 272n6 Antwerp Polyglot (Biblia Regia), 20, 23–24

Apocrypha, 176, 273n17 Apollonius stories, 141, 149, 265n6 Apostles, and Syriac, 22. See also specific Apostles Aquinas, Thomas, 60, 73, 113, 183–84, 186, 200, 246n35, 274n29 Arabic language, 21, 23 Aramaic language, 22, 174, 225, 272n7 Ardolino, Frank, 175 Arendt, Hanna, 225 Aristotle, 181, 226 art versus nature, 162–63, 164–65, 270–71n19, 271n20 atonement/guilt/punishment, in Pericles (Shakespeare), 144, 227–28, 267n25. See also disobedience/penitence, in The Winter’s Tale (Shakespeare) audiences reading Scripture and, 1, 3–4, 5–6, 7, 8–9, 11, 95 of Shakespeare’s plays, 2, 3, 4, 5–6, 11, 71, 195–96 Augustine, 58, 108–9, 151–52, 257n27, 268n39, 268n41 authority of Scripture, and Hamlet (Shakespeare), 195–96, 197–98, 277n35 Authorized Version (King James Bible [KJV]), 17, 31, 32, 42, 92, 108, 207, 211, 270n12 Babylon Jeremiah (biblical figure) and, 90, 261n28, 262n45 and Jerusalem binary, 88 Nebuchadnezzar (biblical figure) in, 174, 177, 182, 184–85, 272–73n8 Whore of Babylon typology and, 45, 175 Bacon, Frances, 73 Bale, Anthony, 87 Bale, John, 46 Ball, John, 197–98 Barker, Christopher, 36–38, 39, 40, 42, 43, 44, 45, 242n47 Barker, John, 174

285

286

Index

Barker, Laurence, 6–8, 10 Barker, Robert, 38, 39, 42, 241n30 bear imagery, 161–62, 270n11 Becke, Edward, 33, 34 Beckwith, Sarah, 65, 151, 266n24, 277n32 Bedwell, William, 23 Bell, Catherine, 276n23 belonging virtue, 224 Berger, Harry, Jr., 65–66 Berlin, Adele, 133, 134 Betteridge, Maurice S., 45, 242n48 Betteridge, Thomas, 225 Beza, Theodor, 19, 20, 25, 26–27, 29, 240n21 Bible, books of Hebrew Bible (Old Testament, Tanach) Genesis, 122, 160, 163, 198, 206, 208, 267n32, 273n18 Exodus, 8, 159, 162, 163, 197 Leviticus, 163 Numbers, 206, 215–217 Deuteronomy, 92, 163, 167, 168, 262n37 i Samuel, 9, 116, 168, 258n34 2 Samuel, 8 i Kings, 158, 159, 160, 163 2 Kings, 160, 162, 163, 167, 168, 218 2 Chronicles, 163 Job, 141, 144, 225, 227 Psalms, 9, 63, 88, 90, 100, 101, 103, 114, 115–16, 137, 138, 146, 163, 167, 168, 182, 214, 226, 246n44, 253n18, 258n31, 258nn35–36, 264n71, 272n6, 273n18, 274n27, 279n56 Proverbs, 104, 227 Isaiah, 97–98, 167, 243n3, 267n26, 272n6, 282n42 Jeremiah, 90, 123–24, 125, 261n28, 261n34, 261nn27–28, 262n45, 263n52, 264n75, 264n76 Lamentations, 90, 122, 123–24, 126, 127, 128, 130, 131, 133, 134, 135, 136, 137, 260n16, 261n28, 261n34, 262nn40–41, 262n45, 265n80 Ezekiel, 94 Daniel, 92, 172, 176, 182, 186, 272nn6–7, 274n21 Jonah, 3–4, 76, 80, 144 Habakkuk, 165, 167–68 New Testament Matthew, 5, 14, 41, 45, 51, 64, 67, 73, 76, 77, 104, 109, 110–11, 147, 154, 168, 174, 189, 191, 196, 198, 200, 202, 203, 208, 226, 243n3, 243n52, 256n7, 257n27, 274n22 Mark, 107, 110, 111, 218, 243n3, 243n52 Luke, 92, 107, 110, 145, 148, 165, 243n53, 256n7, 257n27

John, 8, 12, 51, 52, 53, 54, 56, 57, 58–59, 60–62, 63, 66, 67–68, 243n3, 243n53, 245n16 Acts of the Apostles, 23, 45, 92, 137, 142, 148–49, 151, 154, 206, 207, 208, 209, 211 Romans, 14, 52, 114, 151, 206, 207–8, 209–11, 212–13, 214, 215, 216–17, 218, 221, 268n39, 268n41, 280n14, 281n21, 281n27 i Corinthians, 45, 206, 279–80n6 2 Corinthians, 148, 168 Ephesians, 46, 243n53 Philippians, 197, 201 i Thessalonians, 168 i Timothy, 90, 148–49, 206 2 Timothy, 90–91 Hebrews, 8, 46, 98 Revelation, 7, 30, 45–46, 77, 86, 88, 89, 92, 163, 280n7 Bible(s). See also Bible, books of; embodied reading (lived Bible); and specific Bibles black-letter (“English letter”) font for, 38, 42, 45, 241nn27–28, 241n25 Catholic, 1, 20, 21, 24, 25, 28, 30–31, 58–61, 62, 209, 268n41 conversion as term of use in, 154 cultural fascination with, 1 harmonization/collocation in, 8, 108, 111, 207 octavo format, 36, 37, 38, 42, 44, 45, 47, 240n20, 240n22, 241n24 private readings of, 1, 2 prostration and, 127, 262n37 public readings of, 1, 3, 11, 30, 31, 103 quarto format for, 36–37, 38, 42, 43, 241nn24–25, 241nn27–28, 242n47 romance genre and, 148, 149 sea voyage/shipwreck in, 141, 144 textual forms for, 1 word-against-word practice in, 108 Biblia Hebraica (Münster), 25–26 Biblia Regia (Antwerp Polyglot), 20, 23–24 Biblia Sacrosanta, 26 biblical allusion, 3, 11. See also biblical interpretation; performance of biblical texts; reading Scripture biblical allusion, in Hamlet (Shakespeare) about, 195–96 authority of Scripture and, 195–96, 197–98, 277n35 death and, 5, 202–3, 279n56 literal and figurative/allegorical interpretation and, 9 political theology in Scripture and, 214 pregnant with meaning language and, 73, 74 providentialism and, 191, 200, 278n48 puns and, 73, 74, 75, 79–86 the self as book and, 69, 84–86

Index biblical allusion, in Measure for Measure (Shakespeare) Eucharistic controversy and, 52, 62, 67–68, 243n3 law/order/justice interpretation and, 9, 12, 51, 62–68, 247n48 obedience to state and, 208 reading Scripture and, 5, 9 biblical allusion, in Shakespeare’s writings. See also biblical allusion, in Hamlet (Shakespeare); biblical allusion in, The Winter’s Tale (Shakespeare) about, 2, 3, 7, 11, 48, 74, 140–41, 195–96, 206, 229 Henry V, 4, 208 The Merchant of Venice and, 32, 181, 196 Richard II, 107, 114, 208, 256n7, 257–58n28, 258n31 Sir Thomas More, 208 Titus Andronicus, 3, 122 biblical allusion in, Pericles (Shakespeare) about, 3, 141, 145, 267n26 Jonah (biblical figure) story and, 142–47, 266n17 Paul (Apostle) and, 148–50 biblical allusion in, The Winter’s Tale (Shakespeare) about, 3, 13, 270n8, 270n12 bear imagery and, 162, 270n11 disobedience/penitence and, 165, 167 the divine as “living God” and, 168 Elijah (prophet) and, 157–59, 160, 161, 162, 164–65, 167 Elisha (prophet) and, 160, 161, 162, 166, 167 idols/idolatry and, 163, 167–68 Moses (biblical figure) and, 159, 160, 162 biblical features. See also annotations; biblical printers/printing industry; black-letter (“English letter”) font; octavo format; paratextual aids about, 33–36, 46–48 “Erasmus” New Testament and, 34, 35 quarto Bibles and, 36–37, 38, 42, 43, 241nn24–25, 241nn27–28, 242n47 roman and italic fonts and, 41, 41–42, 43, 44 sixteenmo (decimo Sexto) New Testament and, 36–38, 44, 240n21, 240n22, 241n24 biblical interpretation. See also biblical allusion; biblical features; biblical printers/ printing industry; figuration/typology; literal and figurative/allegorical interpretation; reading Scripture about, 1, 11–12, 14, 17, 32, 103 allegories and, 70

287

audiences as familiar with, 2, 5–6, 11 Calvin/Calvinism and, 7, 19, 26, 29, 30, 45 Church of England and, 4 embodied reading/lived Bible and, 5 fourfold (quadriga) and, 9, 72–73, 75, 77, 78, 79, 84 humanist culture and, 35, 47 linguistic knowledge and, 47 literary genres’ interplay with, 13 Luther/Lutheran theology and, 19, 25, 32, 55 metaphors and, 140–41 painted women/sexual immorality and, 163, 270–71n19 performance of biblical texts and, 4, 7, 226 popular hermeneutics and, 1, 2–3, 4–6 public readings and, 4, 30, 31 publishing industry and, 4, 32 pulpit readings and Bibles and, 3, 4, 6, 8, 14, 30, 31, 34, 103, 223 puns and, 73–74, 75, 79–86 reading Scripture and, 1, 8, 20, 25, 26, 32 during Reformation, 2, 3, 5, 9, 11, 32 of Scripture, 1, 8, 20, 25, 26, 32 the self as book and, 69, 84–86 in sermons, 1, 3, 4, 6–11, 84, 85 texts and sources in, 29 Tyndale/Tyndale Bibles and, 19, 20, 55, 56, 73, 198, 206, 209, 210–11, 213 vernacular Bibles and, 17, 29–32 biblical interpretation, in Europe. See also biblical interpretation about, 11, 17, 32 ancient languages and, 18, 20, 21–26 biblical knowledge and, 3, 26 Catholic authority in, 1, 19, 20, 24, 28, 30, 32 Greek language and, 18, 21, 23, 24, 25, 28 Hebrew language and, 18, 19, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25–26, 28 humanist culture and, 18, 19–20, 24–25, 27 linguistic knowledge and, 18, 19, 21, 22, 23, 24–26, 28 pedagogy and, 20, 26 printers/printing industry and, 17, 20, 27–28 publication of Bibles in, 20, 23 Renaissance era and, 17–20 scripturalism/sola scriptura and, 17, 19 texts and sources in, 18–20, 21–24, 25–26 biblical knowledge audiences during sermons and, 3–4, 8–9 publishing industry and, 2–3 during Reformation, 1, 206 of Shakespeare, 2, 3, 29, 34–35, 42, 48, 252n7, 270n12

288

Index

biblical printers/printing industry. See also biblical features; biblical publishing industry about, 4, 11–12, 29–30, 31, 38, 44–46 annotations and, 29–30, 31, 38, 41, 44–46, 242–43n49 biblical knowledge and, 2–4 in Europe, 17, 20, 23, 27–28 imprimatur of monarch and, 40, 41, 41, 42 monopolies and, 32, 36, 37, 240n14 official worship and, 41, 42, 43–44, 45, 46–47, 242n42 paratextual aids and, 3, 28, 40, 42–44, 46–47, 241n24, 242nn47–48, 242n36 printing press and, 4, 7, 10 print runs and, 38, 241n28 Royal Printers and, 36, 38, 240n12 Stationers’ Company and, 36–37, 38, 39, 241n28 Tetragrammaton design and, 42 translations versus printed texts and, 34, 47–48 vernacular Bibles and, 34–35, 38, 41 biblical publishing industry. See also biblical printers/printing industry about, 11–12 biblical interpretation and, 4, 32 biblical knowledge and, 2–3 during Reformation, 2–3 Tyndale/Tyndale Bibles and, 4, 12 vernacular Bibles and, 34–35, 38, 41 biblical rhetoric of lament about, 13, 121, 122, 123 anaphora and, 261n33 death/living death and, 134 emotions and, 133 enargia and, 124–25, 131 grief and, 122, 137–38, 265n80 hand gestures and words in, 133 hyperbole in, 125, 127, 262n40 identity of lamenter and, 123 of Jerusalem’s destruction, 123, 124, 260n20 laments described, 123 linguistic knowledge and, 124 oratorial techniques and, 124, 125, 260n17 past/present and, 126–27 pity and, 126, 127–28, 130–31, 261nn27–28, 263n52, 263nn55–56 posture of lamenters and, 135, 136, 264n76 prostration and, 127 revenge and, 137–38 rhetorical figures and, 124 rhetoric interplay and, 122–23 sea image and, 264n75 suffering and, 13, 122, 260n8 weeping and, 90, 127, 128, 262n41, 264n75

biblical texts. See biblical allusion; reading Scripture biblical virtues belonging, 224 learning, 222–24 middah/middot (virtue/s) and, 223n2, 224, 226, 229 performance, 226 respect, 224–25 in Shakespeare’s writings, 222, 223–24, 225, 226, 227–28, 229 wisdom, 226–29 Biblicism, 104, 230n5 Bicks, Caroline, 142 Biddulph, William (Theophilus Lavender [pseud.]), 146, 147 Bill, John, 38, 42, 44 Birch, William, 174 Bishop, George, 38 Bishops’ Bible annotations in, 31, 44–45, 46, 242–43n49 Cheke’s Bible and, 39–40, 47 Daniel (biblical figure) in, 176, 273n17 Eucharistic controversy and, 58 Great Bible and, 30 Jugge and, 35, 36, 39–40, 47 King James Bible and, 31 Parker, Matthew and, 3, 30, 35, 44–45, 46, 47 Parker and, 3, 30, 35, 44–45, 46, 47 political theology in Scripture and, 207, 211 printed editions of, 38–39, 43, 44, 45, 242n47 as pulpit Bible, 3, 30, 31, 103 reading Scripture and, 103 revision of, 31 Shakespeare’s knowledge of, 3, 29, 48 Susanna (biblical figure) in, 176, 273n17 texts and sources for, 30 black-letter (“English letter”) font, 37–38, 39, 42, 45, 241nn27–28, 241n25 Blayney, Peter, 39 Blomefield, Miles, 152 Bloom, Harold, 185, 258n30 Blumenberg, Hans, 145–46 Bodleian Library, 33, 238n1 Bodley, John, 240n18 Bomberg, Daniel, and Bomberg Bible, 18, 21–22, 23–24, 225 Book of Common Prayer, 3, 47, 61, 115, 190, 208, 267n32 Bossy, John, 197 Boswell, James, 140 Botwinick, Aryeh, 185 Bourdieu, Pierre, 276n23 Bradford, John, 85 Bradley, A. C., 198, 199

Index Brightman, Thomas, 175 Broughton, Hugh, 124, 174, 180, 185 Bucer, Martin, 219, 220 Bunny, Edmund, 200, 278n51 Buxtorf, Johannes, 22 Cajetan, Thomas, 21 Calvin, John, and Calvinism biblical interpretation and, 7, 19, 26, 29, 30, 45 biblical rhetoric of lament and, 124 churchmen and, 213, 281nn27–28 on Daniel (biblical figure), 174, 175, 183 Eucharistic controversy and, 201 fatalism and, 199 Hamlet (Shakespeare) and, 5, 199, 200, 278n48 harmonization/collocation in, 110–11 hyperbole and, 125 Latin Bibles and, 26 on obedience to state, 208–9, 213, 221 performance of biblical texts and, 180 providentialism and, 201–2, 278–79n53, 279n54 sermons and, 7 Vulgate and, 25 camel and needle paradox, 113, 257n26, 257–58n28, 258n29 Camerarius, Joachim, 29 Canini, Angelo, 22 Carter, S., 262n47 Cartwright, Thomas, 195 Castellio, Sebastian, 26 Catholicism. See also Christianity ancient languages/texts scholarship and, 21 authority of church in, 1, 19, 20, 24, 28, 30, 32, 58, 195 Council of Trent and, 20, 24, 28 Counter-Reformation and, 1, 20, 209 Daniel (biblical figure) and, 175 Douay-Rheims Bible and, 1, 20, 30, 31, 268n41 Eucharistic controversy and, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56–57, 58–60, 245nn16–17, 245n19 Hamlet (Shakespeare) and, 80, 82 harmonization/collocation in, 109, 257n22 indebtedness tension and, 173 Latin Bibles and, 20, 24, 25, 28 Luther/Lutheran theology and, 175 Masoretic Bible and, 21 pagan-Christian conflict and, 142 paratextual aids and, 28 political theology in Scripture and, 208, 209, 214 providentialism and, 200–201, 278n51 religious identity during Reformation and, 171–72 Rheims New Testament and, 1, 20, 30–31, 58–61, 62, 209

289

rites/rituals in, 167, 190–91, 194, 195, 201, 218 vernacular Bibles and, 1, 20, 30–31, 58–61, 62, 209, 268n41 Vulgate and, 20, 24, 28, 30 Whore of Babylon figuration/typology and, 45, 175 Causabon, Isaac, 22 Cawood, John, 36, 240n14 censorship, 204, 205, 214 Charke, William, 195 Cheke, Sir John, 39–40 Cheke’s Bible annotations in, 44, 45, 46–47, 48 Bishops’ Bible and, 39–40, 47 Cheke New Testament, 42, 44, 45, 46–47, 48 printed editions of, 37, 42, 44, 45, 46–47, 48, 241n28 Chettle, Henry, 204, 205 Christianity. See also Jew/Christian relationship, and The Merchant of Venice (Shakespeare); reading Scripture; and specific religions anti-Semitism and, 173, 179, 272n6 biblical rhetoric of lament in, 260n16 conversos and, 172 Daniel (biblical figure) and, 174–75, 178–79 early writings and, 149 harmonization/collocation in, 108, 256n10 indebtedness tension in, 173, 183, 184 learning virtue and, 223 Pericles (Shakespeare) and, 142, 144, 147, 148, 152, 267n25, 267nn32–33 Trinity doctrine in, 148, 267n33 churchmen. See also specific churchmen Calvin/Calvinism and, 213, 281nn27–28 in writings, 205, 207, 208, 215 Church of England biblical interpretation and, 4 Eucharistic controversy and, 58, 61, 68 harmonization/collocation and, 111–12 official worship within, 41, 42, 43, 45, 242n42 pagan-Christian conflict and, 142 political theology in Scripture and, 208–9 scripturalism/sola scriptura and, 45 verbal repugnancy and, 111–12 Cicero, 125, 132 Clapham, Henoch, 89 classical literature Delphos/Delos/Delphi and, 161, 270n14 Greek texts and, 141, 149, 154, 164 lament in, 129, 136, 139 Roman texts and, 137 sea voyage/shipwreck in, 141 The Winter’s Tale (Shakespeare) and, 157, 158, 161, 270n14

290

Index

Clemen, Wolfgang, 117 Clement of Llanthony, 109 Clement VIII (pope), 29 collocation (harmonization). See harmonization (collocation) The Comedy of Errors (Shakespeare), 140–41, 224 compassion versus pity, 125–26, 127–28 Complutensian Polyglot, 23, 24 conversion Augustine and, 150–51, 152, 268n39, 268n41 Bibles and, 154 miracle (saint’s) plays and, 154 Paul (Apostle) and, 150, 152, 154 Pericles (Shakespeare) and, 141, 150–52, 154, 227 The Conversion of St. Paul (saint play), 152, 153 conversos, 172 Cooke, Travis, 2, 230–31n5 Cooper, Thomas, 191, 195 Council of Trent, 20, 24, 28 Counter-Reformation, 1, 20, 209 Coverdale, Miles, 29, 239n9 Coverdale Bibles, 33, 34, 115, 211, 212, 238n1, 239n9 Coverdale Psalms, 103 Cranmer, Thomas, 33, 54, 61, 111–12 Cranmer’s Bible, 33, 34 crusade(s), 90, 91, 97, 99, 251n2 Culler, Jonathan, 69 Cummings, Brian, 55, 70, 72, 75, 78, 113, 117, 248n17, 250–51n56 Curren-Aquino, D. T., 269n4, 270n11, 271n20 Cymbeline (Shakespeare), 149 Daniel (biblical figure) in Bishops’ Bible, 176, 273n17 canonical texts and, 174–75 in Christianity, 174–75, 178–79 Geneva Bibles and, 176, 178–79, 273n17 indebtedness and, 182–83 Jerome (saint) on, 178 and Jesus Christ figuration/typology, 174 languages and narrative in book of, 272nn7–8 performance of biblical texts and, 175, 176, 180, 273n12 psalms and, 182, 274n27 publications on, 174 religious identity, 177–78, 274n21 Susanna (biblical figure) and, 174–75, 176, 273n17 Vulgate and, 175, 178 Daniel, Abbot, 94 Daniel (biblical figure), and The Merchant of Venice (Shakespeare) about, 171 Hebrew Bible/Old Testament and, 176, 179 indebtedness and, 182, 184–85

interpretive authority and, 181–82 Nebuchadnezzar (biblical figure) in, 174, 177, 182, 184–85, 272–73n8 paradox of gratitude and, 173, 184–86 performance of biblical texts and, 176, 180 religious identity and, 171–72, 177–78, 179, 186–87, 274n21 Daniell, David, 199 Darlow, T. H., 34 David (biblical figure) embodied reading/lived Bible and, 116, 258n34 and Jesus Christ figuration/typology, 9 psalms and, 182, 274n27 revenge and, 137–38 Dawson, Thomas, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 240n21, 240n23, 241n30, 242n42, 242n47 death/living death, 134, 135 decimo Sexto (sixteenmo) New Testament, 36–38, 44, 240n21, 240n22, 241n24 deer imagery, 133, 263–64n66 Dekker, Thomas, 204 Delany, Paul, 268n41 Delphos/Delos/Delphi, 161, 270n14 de Lubac, Henri, 55 de Monstrelet, Enguerrand, 251n2 Dent, R. W., 84 Denyer, Eliza Denis, and Denyer collection, 33, 34 Derrida, Jacques, 104 Dickson, Vernon Guy, 123 Digby, Sir Kenelm, and Digby Manuscripts, 152, 153, 154 disobedience/penitence, in The Winter’s Tale (Shakespeare), 164, 165, 167. See also guilt/ punishment/atonement, in Pericles (Shakespeare) the divine as “living God,” 168 Dod, John, 124, 125, 131 Dolan, F. E., 270–71n19 Donne, John, 124, 126–27, 152, 188, 214 Douay-Rheims Bible, 1, 20, 30, 31, 268n41 Dove, John, 9 Dowden, Edward, 149 Drayton, Michael, 143 Du Bartas, Guillaume de Saluste, 143 Du Moulin, Pierre, the Younger, 217 Du Vair, Guillaume, 124, 128, 130, 263n52 Dyas, Dee, 98 Eden, Kathy, 210 Eden imagery, 90 Edgerton, W. L., 113 educational curriculum, 3, 223–24 The Education of a Christian Prince (Erasmus), 209–10, 214

Index Edward the Confessor (king), 96–97, 98 Edward VI (king) Bible translations and, 35 biblical taxonomies and, 35 Cheke and, 39 Josiah figuration/typology and, 5 political theology in Scripture and, 207, 219 printed New Testaments under, 35–36, 37, 38–39, 40, 40–41, 41, 241n36 Elijah (prophet), 157–59, 160, 161, 162, 164–65, 167 Elisha (prophet), 160, 161, 162, 166, 167 Elizabeth I (queen) and Elizabethan era. See also Church of England allegories during, 70, 71 biblical interpretation during, 5, 104 biblical taxonomies and, 35 Bishops’ Bible during, 3, 34–35 conversos and, 172 England as new Jerusalem during, 91 Eucharistic controversy during, 68 Geneva Bible and, 3, 34–35, 189–90 Great Bible during, 30 harmonization/collocation and, 112 Henry V (Shakespeare) and, 214, 215 homilies during, 167, 190 law/order/justice during, 64 pilgrimages during, 98 printed New Testaments during, 36, 37, 240n12 puns during, 70–71, 248n10 Reformation under, 4 Religious Settlement of 1559 under, 44–45, 194, 203 Royal Printer appointments by, 36, 240n12 succession crisis and, 199–200 Ten Commandments displays during, 197, 277n35 travel writing during, 141, 146 vernacular Bible during, 189–90 Whittingham as preacher before, 29 women as rulers and, 206, 216–17 Zerubbabel figuration/typology and, 5 Elton, William R., 144 embodied reading (lived Bible) about, 1–2 biblical interpretation, 5 David (biblical figure) and, 116, 258n34 Geneva Bibles and, 116 reading Scripture and, 104, 105, 226 Richard II (Shakespeare) and, 105–7, 114–17, 258n32, 258n34 Vulgate and, 115, 116 emotions, 125, 132, 133, 138 enargia, 124–25, 131

291

England, in Henriad. See Henriad, and England England and Rome binary, 97 “English letter” (black-letter) font, 37–38, 39, 42, 45, 241nn27–28, 241n25 equivoques, 81 Erasmus Annotations on the New Testament, 18, 208, 209–10 Augustine’s works and, 152 camel and needle paradox and, 113, 257–58n28 The Education of a Christian Prince, 209–10, 214 Greek New Testament and, 23–24 historicist reading of Scripture by, 209–10, 214 Latin Bibles and, 17 linguistic knowledge of, 18, 124 Novum Instrumentum omne (Novum Testamentum), 17–19, 24, 27, 32, 33, 209–10, 211, 257–58n28, 280n20 Paraphrases, 113, 257–58n28 political theology in Scripture and, 208–10, 211 printed New Testaments and, 33, 34, 35 texts and sources consulted by, 18–19 Erne, Lukas, 269n1 2 Esdras, 279n56 Estienne, Robert, 25, 28, 29 Ethics of the Fathers (Pirkei Avot), 283n2 Eucharist, and Hamlet (Shakespeare), 194 Eucharistic controversy annotations and, 53, 54, 57–59, 60, 61, 62, 244n9 Catholicism and, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56–57, 58–60, 245nn16–17, 245n19 Church of England and, 58, 61, 68 debates over interpretation and, 53–62, 194–95, 201, 245nn16–17, 245n19 evangelical interpretation and, 53, 54, 56, 245n17, 245n19 flesh and blood of Jesus Christ and, 55–56, 58 Geneva Bibles and, 54, 58, 60, 61–62 literal and figurative/allegorical interpretation and, 53–62, 245nn16–17, 245n19, 246n35 Measure for Measure (Shakespeare), 51–53, 62, 63, 67–68 political theology in Scripture and, 52, 54–55, 57, 60 Protestantism and, 52, 55–56, 58 during Reformation, 52, 53 Rheims New Testament and, 58–61, 62 scholarship on, 52, 244n4 transubstantiation and, 53, 57, 58, 59, 60–61, 62, 246n35 Europe, and biblical interpretation. See biblical interpretation, in Europe

292

Index

Eusebius of Caesarea, 109 evangelical interpretation, and Eucharistic controversy, 53, 54, 56, 245n17, 245n19 Evans, G. B., 279n4 faithful and Israel connection, 9, 87–88, 92–93, 95, 100–102 Farrar, Frederic W., 70, 72 fatalism, 198, 199, 202. See also providentialism Felperin, Howard, 153, 267n25 female personification of Jerusalem, 90, 128, 133 feminist scholarship, 133, 142, 264n68 Fernie, Ewan, 199 Ferry, Anne, 268n41 figuration/typology faithful and Israel connection, 9, 87–88, 92–93, 95, 100–102 Jesus Christ, 9, 174 Jonah (biblical figure), 8–9, 147 Josiah (biblical figure)/Edward VI (king), 5 literal and figurative/allegorical interpretation and, 76, 79, 250–51n56 Middle Ages and, 250–51n56 performance virtue and, 226 in sermons, 8–9 Whore of Babylon, 45, 175 Zerubbabel/Elizabeth I (queen), 5 flesh and blood Eucharistic controversy and, 54.57, 55–56, 58 as family in Pericles (Shakespeare), 147–48, 267nn32–33 resurrection of Jesus Christ and, 148 folded registers of reading, 12, 103–4, 117 Forman, Simon, 156 fortune, turns of, 141–42, 146 fourfold (quadriga) interpretation, 9, 72–73, 75, 77, 78, 79, 84 Foxe, John, 186, 212 France, in Henriad, 87, 91, 251n2 Frith, John, 245n16 Froben, Johann, 18 Frye, Northrop, 148 Frye, Roland Mushat, 193 Fulke, William, 58, 59–60 Fulton, Thomas, on literal and figurative/ allegorical interpretation, 52, 55, 67 Galey, Alan, 2, 230–31n5 Gardiner, Stephen, 54, 61, 216 Geneva Bibles about, 17, 29 annotations in, 4, 17, 20, 29, 30, 45–46, 61, 89–90, 104, 113, 159, 176, 207, 211, 244n9, 246n39, 280n7

as black-letter quarto, 38, 42, 241nn27–28, 241n25, 242n47 Calvin/Calvinism and, 29, 30 camel and needle paradox in, 113 Daniel (biblical figure) in, 176, 178–79, 273n17 Elizabeth I (queen) and, 3, 34–35, 189–90 embodied reading/lived Bible and, 116 Eucharistic controversy and, 54, 58, 60, 61–62 figuration/figuration/typology and, 8–9 geographic descriptions and, 148 harmonization/collocation and, 207 Hebrew Bible/Old Testament in, 29 James VI/I (king) and, 31, 45 names/renaming practice and, 176 New Testament in, 29–30, 61, 279–80n6 obedience to state and, 206 papal power and, 211 paratextual aids and, 61, 178–79, 189–90, 191 political theology in Scripture and, 207, 211, 280n7 printed editions of, 37, 38, 42, 240n18, 241nn27–28, 241n25, 242n47 Protestantism and, 17, 189–90 readers’ annotations in, 89–90 reading Scripture and, 103, 104, 116, 191 Shakespeare’s knowledge of, 2, 3, 29, 48, 252n7, 270n12 Susanna (biblical figure) in, 176, 273n17 as vernacular and popular Bible, 3, 17, 30, 31, 32, 34–35, 103, 189–90 versification in, 29 women’s role and, 279–80n6 Geneva-Tomson New Testament, 29–30, 44 geographic descriptions, 142, 148, 158, 224 Giddens, Eugene, 122 Gilby, Anthony, 29 glosses. See annotations; paratextual aids; and under specific Bibles gods/goddesses pagan-Christian conflict and, 142 Paul (Apostle) and, 149 Pericles (Shakespeare) and, 141, 142, 144, 145, 148, 154 romance genre and, 269n48 in The Winter’s Tale (Shakespeare), 158, 161 Gohory, Jacques, 269n48 Golding, Arthur, 130, 160–61 Goodman, Christopher, 206, 207 Gower, John, 141, 145, 150, 153, 265n6 Grafton, Richard, 33 Grantley, Darryl, 96 Great Bible of 1539–40, 30, 58, 60 Great Bibles, 34 Greek language biblical interpretation in, 18, 21, 23, 24–25, 28

Index Greek New Testaments, 20, 21, 23–24, 25, 29 Greek romance genre, 141, 149, 154, 164 Septuagint, 21–22, 23, 28–29, 76 Greenblatt, Stephen, 189 Greene, Robert, 74, 80, 143, 156, 166, 271n25 grief biblical rhetoric of lament and, 122, 137–38, 265n80 Niobe story in Metamorphoses (Ovid) and, 129–30, 135, 262n47, 262n49 Titus Andronicus (Shakespeare) and, 121, 123, 126, 128–29, 135–37 Griffin, B., 269n48 Grindal, Edmund, 240n18 Gross, John, 177, 273n18 Groves, Beatrice, Texts and Traditions, 2, 230–31n5 Guilpin, Edward, 144 guilt/punishment/atonement, in Pericles (Shakespeare), 144, 227–28, 267n25. See also disobedience/penitence, in The Winter’s Tale (Shakespeare) Gurr, Andrew, 215, 217–18 Gyfford, George, 77–78, 79, 82, 83 Haigh, Chrisopher, 190 Hall, John, 143 Hamlet (Shakespeare) about, 12, 14, 86, 203 amphibology and, 80, 81 Calvin/Calvinism and, 5, 199, 200, 278n48 Catholicism and, 80, 82 equivoques and, 81 Eucharist and, 194 fatalism and, 198–99, 202 fourfold (quadriga) and, 84 on God life force, 141 hendiadys and, 80, 85 language as secular and, 196–97, 277n32 literal and figurative/allegorical interpretation in, 80, 82, 83, 84, 86 Niobe story and, 262n49 “plain and simple”/literalism and, 75, 85, 86 polysemy and, 70, 74, 82 post-Reformation era of contested issues and, 188–91 pregnant with meaning language in, 81 Protestantism and, 80, 81, 82 proverbs and, 84 providentialism and, 199, 202, 203 puns in, 69 religious terrorism and, 199–200 rites/rituals and, 189, 191–94, 196–97, 201, 202, 276n23 Hamlin, Hannibal

293

The Bible in Shakespeare, 2, 90, 258n31 Psalm Culture and Early Modern English Literature, 274n27 Hammill, Graham, 218–19, 220 hand gestures and words, 131–33, 263n63 Harding, Thomas, 54, 216 harmonization (collocation) in Bibles, 8, 111, 207 Calvin/Calvinism and, 110–11 in Catholicism, 109, 257n22 in Christianity, 256n10 Church of England and, 111–12 Elizabethan era and, 112 in New Testaments, 108–11, 256n13 Reformation and, 109–11 Richard II (Shakespeare) and, 5, 112 in sermons, 9 Hebrew Bible (Old Testament, Tanach). See also Bible(s); and under Bible, books of ancient sources/texts and, 21, 22, 23 in Geneva Bible, 29 idols/idolatry in, 218 Latin Bibles and, 25–27 literal translation of, 23, 24, 30 The Merchant of Venice (Shakespeare) and, 176–77, 178, 179, 182 names/renaming practice and, 176–77, 273n18 prostration and, 127, 261n34 Septuagint and, 21–22, 23, 28–29, 76 Ten Commandments displays and, 197, 277n35 Hebrew language, 18, 19, 21, 22, 23, 24–26, 28, 174, 272n7 Heinsius, Daniel, 90 hendiadys, 80, 85 Henriad, and England crusades and, 90–91, 97, 99, 251n2 Eden imagery and, 90 France’s conquest and, 87, 91, 251n2 new Jerusalem and, 88, 89–90, 91–93, 97, 99 Henry II (king), 97 Henry III (king), 96 Henry IV (king), 91, 96–97, 98, 99, 100, 251n2 1 Henry IV (Shakespeare) crusade and, 90–91, 97 new Jerusalem and, 95 pilgrimage and, 88, 97–98 politics of unity and, 91, 101 2 Henry IV (Shakespeare) about, 12 crusade and, 91, 99 England as new Jerusalem and, 88, 97 faithful and Israel connection and, 9, 87–88, 101–2 London as new Jerusalem and, 87–88, 95–96, 98, 100, 102

294

Index

2 Henry IV (Shakespeare) (cont.) pilgrimage and, 87, 88, 96–97, 98 politics of unity and, 91, 99, 102 post-Reformation era and, 97 Westminster Abbey and, 87, 96 Henry V (Shakespeare) biblical allusion in, 4, 208 Christian prince and, 215, 218 churchmen in, 205 crusade and, 91 Eden imagery and, 90 Elizabeth I (queen) as mirror image of, 214, 215 England as new Jerusalem and, 90 morals and, 217–18 obedience to state and, 214, 215, 216–18 political theology in Scripture and, 208, 215 politics of unity and, 88, 99–100 Richard II’s bones and, 100 Henry VIII (king), 30, 35, 98, 211, 212, 212, 215 Henry VIII (Shakespeare), 205 Hentenius, Johannes, 28 Herbert, A. S., 34, 239n9 Herbert, George, 73 hermeneutics, biblical. See biblical interpretation hermeneutics, popular, 1, 2–3, 4–6. See also biblical interpretation Heywood, Thomas, 204 Hobbes, Thomas, 32 Hoby, Lady Margaret, 89 Hoeniger, David, 153 Holbein, Hans, the Younger, 211, 212, 212, 215 Holinshed’s Chronicles, 91, 92, 96–97, 99, 216, 253n23 Hollybushe, Johan/Iohan (pseud.), 33, 34, 239n9 homilies, 167, 190, 200, 209 Hooker, Richard, 195 Howson, John, 76–77, 79, 84, 251n61 Hoy, Cyrus, 267n25 Hulse, S. Clarke, 122 humanist culture, 18, 19–20, 24–25, 27 human relationships, in The Winter’s Tale (Shakespeare), 167 Hunt, Maurice, 266n17 Hunter, G. K., 52 hyperbole, 121, 125, 127, 262n40 idols/idolatry, 55, 163, 167–68, 218, 282n42 indebtedness, 173, 182–85, 186, 274n29 Innocent III (pope), 114–15, 258n32 interpretive authority, and The Merchant of Venice (Shakespeare), 171, 177–78, 179–82, 186–87, 274n22 invocation of things not present, in literature, 114, 258n30 Islam, 225

Israel and faithful connection, 9, 87–88, 92–93, 95, 100–102 italic and roman fonts, and biblical printing industry, 41, 41–42, 43, 44 Jacinthus (priest), 93 Jacob (biblical figure), 178 James VI/I (king), 31, 35, 42, 45, 247n48 Jansenius of Ghent, Cornelius, 257n22 Jeremiah (biblical figure), 90, 123–24, 125, 261n27, 261n28, 262n45, 264n76 Jerome (saint), 27, 91–92, 178, 273n18. See also Vulgate Jerusalem. See also new Jerusalem as brought back home, 87, 93–95 conquest and destruction of, 89–90, 91, 123, 124, 251n2, 260n20 Eden imagery and, 90 female personification of, 90, 128, 133 pilgrimages to, 87, 88, 93–95, 96–98 politics of unity with, 99–100, 101, 102 and Rome binary, 88, 97 Jesus Christ. See also Eucharistic controversy camel and needle paradox and, 257n27 crusade and, 90–91 Daniel (biblical figure) and, 174 figuration/typology and, 9, 174 learning virtue and, 223 oratorial techniques and, 124, 125 Paul (Apostle) as convert and, 152 resurrection of, 147, 148 sea voyage/shipwreck and, 145 Syriac as language of, 22 Jew/Christian relationship, and The Merchant of Venice (Shakespeare) about, 171–72 indebtedness and, 184–85 paradox of gratitude and, 185 religious identity and, 172–73, 177–78, 179, 186–87, 274n21 Jewel, John, 54, 216 Jews. See also Jew/Christian relationship, and The Merchant of Venice (Shakespeare) anti-Semitism and, 173, 179, 272n6 atonement and, 227 conversos and, 172 Daniel (biblical figure) and, 174–75 indebtedness tension and, 183 texts and sources and, 21, 22, 25–26 virtue/s (middah/middot) and, 223n2, 224, 226, 229 Job (biblical figure), 141, 144, 225, 227 Johnson, Ben, 140 Jonah (biblical figure). See also under Bible, books of

Index in Christian popular culture, 143 figuration/typology and, 8–9, 147 literal and figurative/allegorical interpretation and, 76, 80, 250n36 recovery and, 228 sea voyage/shipwreck and, 144 in Shakespeare’s writings, 3–4, 227–28 wisdom and, 226–27 Joseph (biblical figure), 177, 273n18 Josephus, Flavius, 26 Jowett, J., 279n4 Joye, George, 53, 54, 56, 59, 60, 175, 245n17, 245n19 Jud, Leo, 26 Judeo-Christian narratives, 122, 127, 128, 129, 134, 136, 139 Jugge, Richard annotations and, 38, 44 Bishops’ Bible and, 35, 36, 39–40, 47 Cheke and, 39–40, 242n33 Dawson as apprentice of, 38, 240n23 death of, 36 octavo Bibles and, 36, 37, 38, 42, 241n24 paratextual aids and, 42–43, 44, 241n24, 242n36 as printer of New Testaments, 35–37, 38–39, 40, 40–43, 41, 239–40n11, 240n14, 241nn24–25, 242n36 quarto Bibles and, 36–37, 38, 42, 241nn24–25 sixteenmo (decimo Sexto) New Testament and, 36–37, 240n21, 241n24 Tyndale Bible/Tyndale-Jugge Bible and, 38–39, 43, 44, 47, 242–43n49, 242n33, 242n49 Junius, Franciscus, 19, 23, 26, 27, 30, 89 Justin Martyr, 109 Kahn, Victoria, 218–19, 220 Kantorowicz, Ernst, 219, 220 Kastan, David, 48 Kearney, James, 57–58, 73, 218, 246n25 Kendall, Gillian Murray, 123 Kendall, R. T., 278–79n53 King, John, 75–76, 79, 80, 226–27 King James Bible (KJV, Authorized Version), 17, 31, 32, 42, 92, 108, 207, 211, 270n12 King John (Shakespeare), 199–200 King Lear (Shakespeare), 144, 161–62, 227–28, 266–67n24 Kirton, Henry (transl.), The Mirror of Man’s Life, 114–15, 258n32 Knight, G. Wilson, 267n25 Knox, John, 206, 216 Kugel, James, 103 Kyd, Thomas, 175

295

Lake, Peter, 65, 67, 188, 189 lament and lamenters. See also biblical rhetoric of lament about, 123, 124 in classical literature, 129, 136, 139 posture of lamenters and, 135, 136, 264n76, 264n77 in Titus Andronicus (Shakespeare), 121, 123, 136, 259n6, 264n77 language as secular, 196–97, 277n32 Latimer, Hugh, 207, 214 Latin Bibles. See also Vulgate annotations in, 18, 19, 20 Catholicism and, 20, 24, 25, 28 Protestantism and, 3, 17, 18, 24, 25–27, 28 Laud, William, 32 Lavender, Theophilus [pseud.] (William Biddulph), 146, 147 learning virtue, 222–24 Lever, J. W., 63 Levita, Elijah, 21, 23, 24 Levy, Ian Christopher, 248–49n20 Lewalski, B. Kiefer, 92, 172, 250–51n56 Lillo, George, 140 linguistic forms amphibology, 74–75, 78–79, 80, 81 equivoques, 81 hendiadys, 80, 85 polysemy, 70, 71, 74, 79, 82, 96 during Victorian era, 69 linguistic knowledge, 18, 19, 21, 22, 23, 24–26, 28, 124, 225 Lipsius, Justus, 125 literal and figurative/allegorical interpretation. See also allegorical interpretation; biblical interpretation; reading Scripture camel and needle paradox and, 257n27 Eucharistic controversy and, 53–62, 245nn16–17, 245n19, 246n35 figuration/typology and, 76, 79, 250–51n56 fourfold (quadriga) interpretation and, 9, 72–73, 75, 77, 78, 79, 84 Hamlet (Shakespeare) and, 9, 80, 82, 83, 84, 86 Jonah (biblical figure) and, 76, 80, 250n36 law/order/justice in Measure for Measure (Shakespeare) and, 9, 12, 51, 62–68, 247n48 Luther/Lutheran theology and, 71, 72, 82, 248n17 Middle Ages and, 55, 56, 70 political theology in Scripture and, 62 pregnant with meaning texts and, 72–73, 223, 249n26 Protestantism and, 71–73, 75–79 Reformation and, 74, 251n65 sermons and, 71, 72, 75–78, 80, 250n36 in Titus Andronicus (Shakespeare), 123

296

Index

literalism/ “plain and simple,” and Protestantism, 55, 71, 75, 78, 79, 85, 86, 206–7, 211, 212–13. See also literal and figurative/ allegorical interpretation literary genres. See also classical literature; romance genre biblical interpretation’s interplay with, 13 Shakespeare’s writings and, 149, 164 Lithgow, William, 93 lived Bible (embodied reading). See embodied reading (lived Bible) Lively, Edward, 174 living death/death, 134, 135 Lodge, Thomas, 143 L’Oiseleur, Pierre, 29 London Jerusalem brought back home and, 94–95 as new Jerusalem, 87, 88, 95–96, 101, 102 Louvain Vulgates, 28–29 Love’s Labour’s Lost (Shakespeare), 157 Lupton, Julia Reinhard Citizens Saints, 176, 274n22 on names/renaming, 176 on political theology in Scripture, 218–19, 220 Luther, Martin, and Lutheran theology Bible of, 19, 20 biblical interpretation by, 19, 25, 32, 55 on Catholicism, 175 Daniel (biblical figure) and, 175 literal and figurative/allegorical interpretation and, 71, 72, 82, 248n17 New Testament of 1522 and, 18, 209 papal power and, 211 political theology in Scripture and, 210–11 providentialism and, 200 scripturalism/sola scriptura and, 1, 17, 19 Vulgate and, 24, 27–28 Wittenberg as epicenter for, 27–28 Luxon, Thomas H., 172, 251n65 Macbeth (Shakespeare), 73, 200 MacDonald, George, 69–70, 74 MacDonald, Michael, 193 Macray, William, 33, 34, 35, 238n1 Maimonides, 180 Malone, Edmund, 140 Manningham, John, 89 Martin, Gregory, 30, 268n41 Marx, Steven, 2, 230–31n5 Mary I (queen) and Maryan era, 3, 5, 33, 35–36, 68, 89, 206, 216 Mary Magdalene (saint play), 152, 153, 154 Masoretic Bible, 21–22, 23, 24 Matthew Bibles, 33, 34 McNulty, Robert, 278n51

Measure for Measure (Shakespeare). See also biblical allusion, in Measure for Measure (Shakespeare) about, 5, 12, 51, 52–53, 68 Eucharistic controversy and, 51–53, 62, 63, 67–68 law/order/justice interpretation and, 9, 51, 62–68, 247n48 morals and, 63, 67, 247n48 Meek, Richard, 123, 265n78 Melanchthon, Philip, 19 Men of the Great Synagogue (Anshei Knesset HaGadola), 174, 272n7 The Merchant of Venice (Shakespeare). See also Daniel (biblical figure), and The Merchant of Venice (Shakespeare); Jew/ Christian relationship, and The Merchant of Venice (Shakespeare) about, 13–14, 187 biblical allusion/proverbs and, 32, 181, 196 Hebrew Bible/Old Testament and, 176–77, 178, 179, 182 indebtedness and, 173, 182, 183, 184–85 interpretive authority and, 171, 177–78, 179–82, 186–87, 274n22 names/renaming practice and, 176–77 paradox of gratitude and, 173, 184–86 performance of biblical texts and, 176, 180 religious identity and, 171–73, 177–78, 179, 186–87, 274n21 respect virtue and, 225 wisdom virtue and, 226 Metamorphoses (Ovid) Niobe story in, 129–30, 135, 262n49 Pygmalion narrative in, 156, 157, 160–61, 166, 168 metaphors, 140–41, 144, 145–46, 150 Methuen, Charlotte, 200 middah/middot (virtue/s), 223n2, 224, 226, 229 Middle Ages Augustine’s influence during, 268n41 Catholic ritualism during, 189, 190 dramas and, 153–54 fatalism and, 202 fourfold (quadriga) and, 9, 72–73, 75, 77, 78, 79, 84 idols/idolatry as anachronistic and, 218 Jerusalem brought back home during, 87, 93 literal and figurative/allegorical interpretation during, 55, 56, 70, 248n20 pilgrimages during, 98 political theology in Scripture and, 220 religious dramas, 141, 152, 153 typologies and, 250–51n56 Vulgate and, 18, 19, 27

Index Middleton, Tomas, 73, 249n26 A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Shakespeare), 161–62 Milton, John, 221 miracle (saint’s) plays, 141, 152–54, 269n48 The Mirror of Man’s Life (Kirton, transl.), 114–15, 258n32 Mishnah, 22, 283n2 Montgomery, William, 279n4 morals Henry V (Shakespeare) and, 217–18 Measure for Measure (Shakespeare) and, 63, 67, 247n48 painted women/sexual immorality and, 163, 166, 270–71n19 political theology in Scripture and, 213, 217–18, 281nn27–28 The Winter’s Tale (Shakespeare) and, 163, 166 More, Thomas on authority of Catholic church, 195 Eucharistic controversy and, 53, 54, 56–57, 59, 60, 245nn16–17, 245n19 Mosaic Law (Ten Commandments), 85, 177, 197, 274n21, 277n35 Moses (biblical figure), 21, 77, 159, 160, 162, 177, 261n34 The Most Lamentable Roman Tragedy of Titus Andronicus (Shakespeare). See biblical rhetoric of lament; Roman rhetoric of oratory; Titus Andronicus (Shakespeare) Moule, H. S., 34 Mozley, J. F., 239n9 Muller, Richard A., 72 Munday, Anthony, 204, 205 Münster, Sebastian, 22, 25–26, 30 Murray, Molly, 151, 268n41 musicality, in Richard II (Shakespeare), 116, 258nn35–36 names/renaming practice, 176–77 Napier, John, 89 Nashe, Thomas, 95, 124, 125, 260n20 nature versus art, 162–63, 164–65, 270–71n19, 271n20 Nebuchadnezzar (biblical figure), 174, 177, 182, 184–85, 272–73n8 Newberry, Ralph, 38 new Jerusalem. See also Jerusalem Eden imagery and, 90 England as, 88, 89–90, 91–93, 97, 99 London as, 87–88, 95–96, 98, 100, 101, 102 sermons on, 89 New Testament(s). See also under Bible, books of annotations in, 41

297

black-letter (“English letter”) style and, 37–38, 241nn27–28 Cheke New Testament, 42, 44, 45, 46–47, 48 Estienne’s New Testament, 29 in Geneva Bible, 29–30, 61, 279–80n6 Greek New Testaments, 20, 21, 23–24, 25, 29 harmonization/collocation in, 108–11 Jugge as printer of, 35–37, 38–39, 40, 40–43, 41, 239–40n11, 240n14, 242n36 Latin Bibles and, 25–27 Luther/Lutheran theology and, 18, 209 Novum Instrumentum omne [Novum Testamentum] (Erasmus), 17–19, 24, 27, 32, 33, 209–10, 257–58n28, 280n20 octavo format for, 39, 42, 43, 241n24, 241n30 print runs for, 38, 241n28 Rheims New Testament, 1, 20, 30–31 September Testament of 1522 and, 18, 209 sixteenmo (decimo Sexto) and, 36–38, 240n21, 240n22, 241n24 Syriac New Testaments, 22, 23–24 Tyndale/Tyndale Bibles and, 18, 33, 34, 38–39, 47, 209, 242n48 Nicholson, James, 33, 239n9 Niobe story, in Metamorphoses (Ovid), 129–30, 135, 262n47, 262n49 Noble, Richmond, 3 Norton, Bonham, 38, 42, 44 Norton, David, 32 Novum Instrumentum omne [Novum Testamentum] (Erasmus), 17–19, 24, 27, 32, 33, 209–10, 211, 257–58n28, 280n20 obedience to state, in Scripture about, 14, 206–7, 220 Calvin/Calvinism and, 208–9, 221 Geneva Bibles and, 206 Henry V (Shakespeare) and, 214, 215, 216–18 Measure for Measure (Shakespeare) and, 208 Shakespeare’s writings and, 14 Tyndale on, 206, 209, 210–11, 213, 214, 219, 220, 221, 280n14 women as rulers and, 206, 216–17 O’Connor, Kathleen, 123 octavo format Bibles and, 36, 37, 38, 42, 44, 47, 240n20, 240n22, 241n24 New Testament and, 39, 42, 43, 241n24, 241n30 for sermons, 9, 10 Oecolampadius, Johannes, 18 official worship, and biblical printers/printing industry, 41, 42, 43–44, 45, 46–47, 242n42

298

Index

Old Testament. See Hebrew Bible (Old Testament, Tanach); and under Bible, books of Onkelos Targum, 23 oratorial techniques, and biblical rhetoric of lament, 124, 125, 260n17. See also Roman rhetoric of oratory Orgel, Stephen, 117, 259n38, 270n12 Ortelius, Abraham, 148 Osiander, Andreas, 110, 111 Othello (Shakespeare), 225 Ovid, and Shakespeare, 157, 269n6. See also Metamorphoses (Ovid) Pafford, J. H., 162, 270n11, 271n20 Pagninus, Santes, 23, 24, 25, 30 pain as unbearable, in Titus Andronicus (Shakespeare), 121, 123, 132–33, 259n2 painted women/sexual immorality, 163, 166, 270–71n19 papal power, popes and, 28–29, 114–15, 211–12 paradox of gratitude, 173, 184–86 paratextual aids. See also annotations biblical printers and, 3, 28, 40, 42–44, 46–47, 241n24, 242nn47–48, 242n36 Catholicism and, 28 Geneva Bibles and, 61, 178–79, 189–90, 191 official worship with, 43–44, 46–47, 242n42 Protestantism and, 4, 28, 41, 42, 43 for reading Scripture, 3, 12, 32, 43, 47 sermons and, 4, 10–11 Parker, Matthew Bishops’ Bible created by, 3, 30, 35, 44–45, 46, 47 death of, 36 Geneva Bible publication and, 240n18 Parker, Patricia, 140–41 Parsons, Robert, 195, 200 Paul (Apostle) learning virtue and, 223 Pericles (Shakespeare) and, 148–50, 152, 154 political theology in Scripture and, 207, 209–10, 218, 280n7 on women’s role, 206 Peele, George, 180 Pellikan, Konrad, 18, 25 penitence/disobedience, in The Winter’s Tale (Shakespeare), 164, 165, 167. See also guilt/ punishment/atonement, in Pericles (Shakespeare) Pentateuch, 21–22, 23 performance of biblical texts biblical interpretation and, 4, 7, 226 Calvin/Calvinism and, 180 Daniel (biblical figure) and, 175, 176, 273n12

The Merchant of Venice (Shakespeare) and, 176, 180 during Reformation, 175 sermons and, 4, 7, 205, 206 performance virtue, 226 Pericles (Shakespeare). See also biblical allusion in, Pericles (Shakespeare) about, 13, 140, 154–55, 265n2 Apollonius stories and, 141, 149, 265n6 Christian reading of, 142, 144, 147, 148, 152, 267n25, 267nn32–33 as conversion story, 141, 150–52, 154, 227 feminist scholarship and, 142 flesh and blood as family in, 147–48, 267nn32–33 and fortune, turns of, 141–42, 146 geographic descriptions and, 142, 148, 158, 224 gods/goddesses in, 141, 142, 144, 145, 148, 154 Jonah (biblical figure) and, 227–28 King Lear (Shakespeare) and, 144, 266–67n24 miracle (saint’s) plays and, 141, 152, 153, 154 resurrection in, 147–48, 149 reunions in, 164, 271n23 romance genre and, 149, 150, 227 sea voyage/shipwreck metaphor in, 144, 145–46, 150 Trinity doctrine and, 148, 267n33 Perkins, William, 72, 75, 78, 201–2, 278–79n53, 279n54 Peschitta, 22, 23 Peter (Apostle), 9, 207 Philip II (king), 20, 23 Philo, 70 physical appearances, in Titus Andronicus (Shakespeare), 133–34, 263n64, 264n68 pilgrimage(s) about, 98 Eden imagery and, 90 Edward the Confessor and, 96–97 1 Henry IV (Shakespeare) and, 88, 97–98 2 Henry IV (Shakespeare) and, 87, 88, 96–97, 98 Henry IV (king) and, 96–97 Henry VIII and, 98 Richard II (Shakespeare) and, 88, 97, 101 Pirkei Avot (Ethics of the Fathers), 283n2 Pitcher, John, 270n11 pity biblical rhetoric of lament and, 126, 127–28, 130–31, 261nn27–28, 263n52, 263nn55–56 compassion versus, 125–26, 127–28 reason versus, 136, 261n27 Roman rhetoric of oratory and, 126, 127, 131, 261n32 Titus Andronicus (Shakespeare) and, 126, 127–28, 130–31, 261nn27–28, 263nn52–53

Index “plain and simple”/literalism, and Protestantism, 55, 71, 75, 78, 79, 85, 86, 206–7, 211, 212–13. See also literal and figurative/ allegorical interpretation Plantin, Christopher, and printing house, 20, 23 poetry, and invocation of things not present, 114, 258n30 political theology in Scripture as term of use, 218–21 Bishops’ Bible and, 207, 211 Catholicism and, 208, 209, 214 churchmen and, 207, 208 Church of England and, 208–9 Edward VI (king) and, 207, 219 Erasmus and, 208–10, 211 Eucharistic controversy and, 52, 54–55, 57, 60 Geneva Bibles and, 207, 211, 280n7 Hamlet (Shakespeare) and, 214 Henry V (Shakespeare) and, 208, 215 literal and figurative/allegorical interpretation and, 62 Luther/Lutheran theology and, 210–11 Middle Ages and, 220 morals and, 213, 217–18, 281nn27–28 Paul (Apostle) and, 207, 209–10, 218, 280n7 political theology and, 207–14, 280n7 Protestantism and, 206–7, 209 Reformation and, 220–21 during Renaissance, 207, 220 Richard II (Shakespeare) and, 208, 213, 214, 215–16 secular, 206, 213, 220, 221 in sermons, 207, 209 Sir Thomas More (Shakespeare) and, 208 Tudor era and, 206, 211, 214, 217 politics of unity, 88, 91, 99–100, 101, 102 Polyglot Bibles, 20, 23–24 polysemy, 70, 71, 74, 79, 82, 96 popes and papal power, 28–29, 114–15, 211–12, 258n32 popular hermeneutics, 1, 2–3, 4–6 Postel, Guillaume, 21, 22, 23 post-Reformation. See also Reformation as term of use, 276n12 ancient languages/texts during, 21 biblical interpretation during, 14, 32 contested issues during, 188–91, 194–95 2 Henry IV (Shakespeare) and, 97 Ten Commandments as novelty in, 197, 277n35 poysemic dramatic narratives, 95 Prayer Book Psalter, 3, 90–91, 100, 103 pregnant with meaning texts, 72–73, 223, 249n26 Presbyterianism, 195

299

printers/printing industry, biblical. See biblical printers/printing industry; biblical publishing industry private readings of Bible, 1, 2 prosopopoeia, 129, 130, 136 prostration, 127, 128, 136, 262n37 Protestantism. See also Christianity; Reformation; scripturalism/sola scriptura, in Protestantism ancient languages/texts and, 21 annotations and, 45–46 Biblicism and, 230n5 Daniel (biblical figure) and, 175–76, 178 emotions and, 125 Eucharistic controversy and, 52, 55–56, 58 faithful and Israel typology in, 87–88, 92–93, 95, 100–102 fourfold (quadriga) and, 75, 77 Geneva Bibles and, 17, 189–90 Hamlet (Shakespeare) and, 80, 81, 82 homilies and, 190 indebtedness tension in, 173, 183, 185 Jerusalem brought back home and, 93–94 Latin Bibles and, 3, 17, 18, 24, 25–27, 28 literal and figurative/allegorical interpretation and, 71–73, 75–79 London as new Jerusalem in, 87, 88 Masoretic Bible and, 21 official worship within, 43–44, 46–47, 242n42 pagan-Christian conflict and, 142 paratextual aids and, 4, 28, 41, 42, 43 “plain and simple”/literalism in, 55, 71, 75, 78, 79, 85, 86, 206–7, 211, 212–13 political theology in Scripture and, 209 pregnant with meaning texts and, 72–73 providentialism and, 200, 278n51 reason versus pity and, 126, 261n27 religious identity during Reformation and, 171–72 Religious Settlement of 1559 and, 44–45, 194, 203 rites/rituals in Catholicism critique and, 167, 190–91, 194, 195, 201, 218 Stoicism/neo-Stoicism and, 125–26 during Tudor era, 204, 213 vernacular Bibles and, 3, 17, 41, 189–90 Vulgate and, 27, 28 proverbs, in writings of Shakespeare, 32, 84, 181, 196, 251n59 providentialism Calvin/Calvinism and, 201–2, 278–79n53, 279n54 Catholicism and, 200–201, 278n51 fatalism versus, 198, 199, 202

300

Index

providentialism (cont.) Hamlet (Shakespeare) and, 191, 199, 200, 202, 203 Luther/Lutheran theology and, 200 Protestantism and, 200, 278n51 public readings of Bibles, 1, 3, 11, 30, 31, 103, 223 pulpit readings, 3, 4, 6, 8, 14, 30, 31, 34, 103, 223 punishment/atonement/guilt, in Pericles (Shakespeare), 144, 227–28, 267n25. See also disobedience/penitence, in The Winter’s Tale (Shakespeare); penitence/ disobedience, in The Winter’s Tale (Shakespeare) puns allegorical interpretation and, 70, 71, 74 biblical interpretation in Shakespeare’s writings and, 73–74, 223 critiques of, 69, 70–71, 247n4, 249n28 in Shakespeare’s writings, 69, 73–74, 75, 79–86 Pygmalion narrative, in Metamorphoses (Ovid), 156, 157, 160–61, 166, 168 quadriga (fourfold) interpretation, 9, 72–73, 75, 77, 78, 79, 84 quarto Bibles, 36–37, 38, 42, 43, 241nn24–25, 241nn27–28, 242n47 Quilligan, Maureen, 70 Quintilian, 125, 131, 132, 261n32, 262n44 Qur’an, 225 Rabbinic Bible (Bomberg Bible), 18, 21–22, 23–24, 225 rabbinic commentaries, 21, 22, 25–26, 29 Rashi, 180 Read, Sophie, 71, 73–74 readers’ annotations, 89–90 reading Scripture. See also Bible, books of; Bible(s); biblical allusion; embodied reading (lived Bible); figuration; Hebrew Bible; literal and figurative/allegorical interpretation; scripturalism/sola scriptura, in Protestantism about, 12, 103–4 alternative readings and, 26, 32 audiences and, 1, 3–4, 5–6, 7, 8–9, 11, 95 authority of Scripture and, 195–96, 197–98, 277n35 biblical interpretation and, 1, 8, 20, 25, 26, 32 Biblicism and, 104, 230n5 Bishops’ Bible and, 103 Book of Common Prayer and, 190 in Catholicism, 20, 32 in educational curriculum, 3, 223–24 folded registers of reading and, 12, 104, 117 Geneva Bibles and, 103, 104, 191

historicists and, 32, 43, 209–10, 214 imprimatur of monarch and, 41, 42 paratextual aids for, 3, 12, 32, 43, 47 printed text versus translations and, 34, 47–48 pulpit readings and, 3, 4, 6, 8, 14, 30, 31, 34, 103, 223 sermons and, 8, 190, 200, 206 texts and sources for studies and, 18, 43 verbal repugnancy and, 12, 111–12 vernacular Bibles and, 38, 57–58, 246n25 reanimation/animation, in The Winter’s Tale (Shakespeare), 156–57, 159–61, 162, 166–67, 271n25 reason versus pity, 136, 261n27 recovery, 228–29 Reformation. See also post-Reformation; Protestantism; scripturalism/sola scriptura, in Protestantism anti-Semitism and, 173, 272n6 biblical interpretation during, 2, 3, 5, 9, 11, 32 biblical publishing industry during, 2–3 biblical texts/knowledge during, 1, 206 Eucharistic controversy during, 52, 53 fourfold (quadriga) interpretation and, 9 harmonization/collocation in, 109–11 literal and figurative/allegorical interpretation and, 74, 251n65 performance of biblical texts during, 175 pilgrimages and, 98 political theology in Scripture and, 220–21 popular hermeneutics during, 2, 3, 5 religious identity during, 171–72 vernacular Bibles during, 3, 109, 189 word-against-word practice during, 111–12 religious identity, and The Merchant of Venice (Shakespeare), 171–73, 177–78, 179, 186–87, 274n21 Relihan, Constance C., 142, 267n25 Renaissance Apollonius of Tyre story during, 149 Augustine’s influence during, 268n41 Erasmus and, 17–18 Jerome (saint) and, 27 literal and figurative/allegorical interpretation during, 70 political theology in Scripture during, 207, 220 symbolic imagery during, 117 wisdom virtue and, 226 respect virtue, 224–25 resurrection, 147–48, 149 Reuchlin, Johannes, 18 reunions, 164, 271n23 Reuther, R., 272n6 revenge, 123, 137–38, 139 Reynolds, John, 31

Index Rheims New Testament, 1, 20, 30–31, 58–61, 62, 209 Rhetorica ad Herennium, 127 Richard II (king), 97, 109 Richard II (Shakespeare) about, 5, 8, 12, 117 biblical allusion in, 4, 107, 114, 208, 256n7, 257–58n28, 258n31 camel and needle paradox in, 113, 257n26, 257–58n28, 258n29 churchmen in, 205 embodied reading/lived Bible and, 105–7, 114–17, 258n32, 258n34 England as new Jerusalem and, 90 harmonization/collocation and, 5, 8, 112 invocation of things not present in, 114 musicality in, 116, 258nn35–36 obedience to state and, 214 pilgrimage and, 88, 97, 101 political theology in Scripture and, 208, 213, 214, 215–16 symbolic imagery in, 90, 117, 259n38 verbal repugnancy in, 5, 12, 112–13 weeping and, 90 word-against-word practice and, 107–8, 111, 112–13, 114, 117 Richard III (Shakespeare), 196, 205, 214 Richmond, Robert, 215 rites/rituals in Catholicism, 167, 190–91, 194, 195, 201, 218 Hamlet (Shakespeare) and, 189, 191–94, 196–97, 201, 202, 276n23 Robinson, Richard, 101 Rollock, Robert, 71–72, 78–79 roman and italic fonts, and biblical printing industry, 41, 41–42, 43, 44 romance genre Bible and, 148, 149 gods/goddesses and, 269n48 Greek texts and, 141, 149, 154, 164 miracle (saint’s) plays and, 154, 269n48 Pericles (Shakespeare), 149, 150, 227 The Winter’s Tale (Shakespeare), 164 Romano, Giulio, 164, 165 Roman rhetoric of oratory about, 123, 125 emotions and, 125 hand gestures and words in, 132–33 pity and, 126, 127, 131, 261n32 prostration and, 127, 128 rhetoric interplay and, 122–23 Stoicism/neo-Stoicism and, 122–23 weeping and, 128, 262n44 Rome, 88, 97, 137. See also Roman rhetoric of oratory

301

Rossing, Barbara R., 88 Royal Printers, 38 sacred and state in Scripture. See obedience to state, in Scripture; political theology in Scripture saint’s (miracle) plays, 141, 152–54, 269n48 Samaritan language, 21–22, 225 Samaritan Pentateuch, 21–22 Sandys, George, 93 Scaliger, Joseph, 22, 23 Schmitt, Carl, 206, 213, 219, 220 scripturalism/sola scriptura, in Protestantism Catholicism and, 20, 190–91, 195 Church of England and, 45 Luther/Lutheran theology and, 1, 17, 19 paratextual aids versus, 4 Scripture, reading. See biblical allusion; biblical interpretation; reading Scripture; scripturalism/sola scriptura, in Protestantism sea image(s), 135–36, 264n75 sea voyages/shipwrecks, 141, 144, 145–46, 148–49, 150, 153 secular language, 196–97, 277n32 secular political theology, 206, 213, 219, 220, 221 the self, as book and biblical interpretation, 69, 84–86 Semitic languages, 18, 20, 21, 22. See also specific Semitic languages Seneca, 137, 199 September Testament of 1522 (New Testament of 1522), 18, 209 Septuagint, 21–22, 23, 28–29, 76 sermon(s) audiences and, 3–4, 7, 8–9 Augustine’s conversion and, 152 biblical interpretation in, 1, 3, 4, 6–11, 84, 85 figuration/typology in, 8–9 fourfold (quadriga) interpretation and, 77, 78 harmonization/collocation in, 9 literal and figurative/allegorical interpretation, 71, 72, 75–78, 80, 250n36 new Jerusalem in, 89, 95 octavo format for, 9, 10 paratextual aids during, 4, 10–11 performance of biblical texts and, 4, 7, 205, 206 political theology in Scripture in, 207, 209 puns and biblical interpretation in, 73, 74 reading Scripture and, 8, 190, 200 Scripture and, 8, 190, 200, 206 the self as book and biblical interpretation in, 85 Sir Thomas More (Shakespeare) and, 204–5 wisdom virtue and, 226–27

302

Index

sexual immorality/painted women, 163, 166, 270–71n19 Shaheen, Naseeb, 3, 48, 122, 243n3, 265n6, 267n27, 279n56 Shakespeare, William Apocrypha and, 273n17 Augustine and, 152 Bibles/biblical knowledge of, 2, 3, 29, 34–35, 42, 48, 252n7, 270n12 liturgical experiences of, 3 medieval dramas as known to, 153–54 Ovid and, 157, 269n6 reading Scripture and, 48, 195–96, 200 religious scholarship on, 2, 230–31n5 Shakespeare, William, and writings. See also biblical allusion in, Shakespeare’s writings audiences and, 2, 3, 4, 5–6, 11, 71, 195–96 biblical knowledge and, 2, 3 biblical virtues and, 222, 223–24, 225, 226, 227–28, 229 Book of Common Prayer in, 208 censorship and, 214 churchmen in, 205 folded registers of reading in, 12, 117 Jonah (biblical figure) in, 3–4, 227–28 literary genres and, 149, 164 obedience to state in Scripture and, 14 popular hermeneutics and, 2, 5–6, 13 prayer books and, 3 puns and biblical interpretation in, 73–74, 223 recovery and, 228–29 writings (See also Henry V (Shakespeare); Measure for Measure (Shakespeare); The Merchant of Venice (Shakespeare); Pericles (Shakespeare); Richard II (Shakespeare); Titus Andronicus (Shakespeare); The Winter’s Tale (Shakespeare) All’s Well That Ends Well, 186 The Comedy of Errors, 140–41, 200, 224 Cymbeline, 149 Henry VIII (Shakespeare), 205 King John, 199–200 King Lear, 144, 161–62, 227–28, 266–67n24 Love’s Labour’s Lost, 157 Macbeth, 73, 200 A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 161–62 Othello, 225 Richard III, 196, 205 Sir Thomas More, 4, 204–5, 208, 279n4 The Tempest, 3–4, 149, 227–28 Twelfth Night, 226, 227–28 Two Gentlemen of Verona, 251n59 Shapiro, James, 80, 176

shipwrecks/sea voyages, 141, 144, 145–46, 148–49, 150, 153 Short-Title Catalogue (STC), 34, 240n20, 241n25, 241n27 Shuger, Debora Kuller, 64–65, 218–19, 220, 247n48 Simpson, James, 55, 56, 190, 245n19 Sinfield, Alan, 199 Sir Thomas More (Shakespeare and others), 4, 204–5, 208, 279n4 sixteenmo (decimo Sexto) New Testament, 36–38, 44, 240n21, 240n22, 241n24 Sixto-Clementine, 24, 29 Sixtus V (pope), 28–29 Smalley, Beryl, 55 Smidt, Kristian, 141–42 Smith, Henry, 10, 197 sola scriptura/scripturalism. See scripturalism/sola scriptura, in Protestantism Spenser, Edmund, 71, 85, 103–4, 105 Spinoza, Baruch, 32 Spurgeon, Caroline, 117 Stallybrass, Peter, 10–11 Stationers’ Company, 36–37, 38, 39, 241n28 STC (Short-Title Catalogue), 34, 240n20, 241n25, 241n27 Steevens, George, 140 Steinmetz, David, 72–73, 84, 250–51n56 Sternold-Hopkins metric psalters, 47, 103 Stoicism/neo-Stoicism, 121–23, 125–26, 137, 138, 199 Stow, John, 99, 100–101 Strier, Richard, on Augustine, 268n41 suffering, 13, 122, 131–32, 136, 260n8 Susanna (biblical figure), 174–75, 176, 273n17 sympathy reimagined, in Titus Andronicus (Shakespeare), 123, 136, 265n78 Syriac language, 22–24, 225 Syriac New Testaments, 22, 23–24 Tacitus, 127 Talmud, 21, 174, 175–76, 185 Tanach. See Hebrew Bible; and under Bible, books of Targums, 22, 23–24 Tatian, 109 Taverner, Richard, 34 Taylor, Charles, 189 Taylor, Gary, 279n4 Taylor, Neil, 83 The Tempest (Shakespeare), 3–4, 149, 227–28 Ten Commandments (Mosaic Law), 85, 177, 197, 274n21, 277n35 Tennant, David, 69 terrorism, religious, 199–200

Index Tetragrammaton design, 42 Texts and Traditions (Groves), 2, 230–31n5 textual glosses. See annotations; paratextual aids; and under specific Bibles Thompson, Ann, 83 Tilney, Edmund, 204, 205, 214 Timberlake, Henry, 93, 94 Titus Andronicus (Shakespeare). See also biblical rhetoric of lament; Roman rhetoric of oratory about, 13, 123, 139 anaphora and, 126 biblical allusion in, 3, 122 compassion versus pity and, 127–28 death/living death in, 134, 135 deer image and, 133, 263–64n66 destructive pattern of emulations and, 123, 131 emotions and, 132, 138 enargia and, 124, 131 feminist scholarship and, 133, 264n68 grief and, 121, 123, 126, 128–29, 135–37 hand gestures and words and, 131–33, 263n63 hyperbole in, 121, 127 lament and lamenters in, 121, 123, 136, 259n6, 264n77 literal and figurative/allegorical interpretation in, 123 pain as unbearable in, 121, 123, 132–33, 259n2 past/present/future and, 126, 135 physical appearances and, 133–34, 263n64, 264n68 pity and, 126, 127–28, 130–31, 261nn27–28, 263nn52–53 prosopopoeia and, 129, 130, 136 prostration and, 127, 128, 136 reason versus pity and, 136, 261n27 revenge and, 123, 137–38, 139 rhetoric interplay in, 122–23 sea image and, 135–36 Stoicism/neo-Stoicism and, 121–22, 137, 138 suffering and, 122, 131–32, 136 sympathy reimagined in, 123, 136, 265n78 weeping and, 127, 128, 129–30, 136, 138 Tobin, J. J. M., 279n4 Tomson, Laurence, 29–30, 44 Topsell, Edward, 10 Tossanus, Daniel, 124, 125, 132, 135, 260n17, 264n72, 265n80 transubstantiation, 53, 57, 58, 59, 60–61, 62, 246n35. See also Eucharistic controversy travel writing, Elizabethan, 141, 146 Tremellius, Immanuel, 19, 22, 26, 27 Trinity doctrine, 148, 267n33 Tudor era churchmen in writings during, 205, 215

303

political theology in Scripture and, 211, 214, 217 political theology in Scripture during, 206 Protestantism during, 204, 212–13 Stoicism of writers during, 199 Twelfth Night (Shakespeare), 226, 227–28 Twine, Laurence, 141, 265n6 Two Gentlemen of Verona (Shakespeare), 251n59 Tyndale, William, and Tyndale Bibles biblical interpretation by, 19, 20, 55, 56, 73, 198, 206, 209, 210–11, 213 illegal publication of Bible by, 4, 12 King James Bible and, 31 New Testaments in, 18, 33, 34, 38–39, 47, 209, 242n48 on obedience to state, 206, 209, 210–11, 213, 214, 219, 220, 221, 280n14 publishing industry and, 4, 12 Shakespeare’s writings and, 32 texts and sources for, 18 Tyndale-Jugge text and, 38–39, 43, 44, 47, 242–43n49, 242n33 Vulgate and, 30 typology/figuration. See figuration/typology Udall, John, 122, 124, 263n56 Valla, Lorenzo, 18 Vatable, François, 28 Vatable Bible, 28 verbal repugnancy, 5, 12, 111–13 vernacular Bible(s) Arundel Constitutions and, 109 biblical interpretation and, 17, 29–32 Catholic, 1, 20, 30–31, 58–61, 62, 209, 268n41 Geneva Bibles as, 17, 30, 31, 32, 34–35, 103, 189–90 Protestant, 3, 41 publishing industry and, 34–35, 38, 41 reading Scripture and, 38, 57–58, 246n25 Reformation and, 3, 109, 189 Veteris Testamenti (Tremellius-Junius), 26, 27 Victorian era, and linguistic forms, 69, 70, 71 virtue/s (middah/middot), 223n2, 224, 226, 229 virtues, biblical. See biblical virtues Voss, Paul J., 70 Vulgata Sixtina, 29 Vulgate. See also Latin Bibles ancient languages/texts scholarship and, 21 Antwerp Polyglot and, 24 atonement/guilt/punishment in Pericles (Shakespeare) and, 227 authority of Catholic church and, 20, 24, 28, 30, 58 camel and needle paradox in, 257–58n28 conversion as term of use in, 154

304

Index

Vulgate (cont.) Daniel (biblical figure) and, 175, 178 defenders of, 25 embodied reading/lived Bible and, 115, 116 Luther/Lutheran theology and, 24, 27–28 Masoretic Bible and, 23 Novum Instrumentum omne [Novum Testamentum] (Erasmus) and, 18, 211, 280n20 political theology in Scripture and, 211 Protestantism and, 27, 28 revisions of, 18, 19, 24, 27, 28–29 Rheims New Testament and, 20, 58 Tyndale/Tyndale Bibles and, 30 versification in, 29 Waith, Eugene, 262n47 Walsham, Alexandra, 200 Walter, J. H., 215 weeping biblical rhetoric of lament and, 90, 127, 128, 262n41, 264n75 Richard II (Shakespeare) and, 90 Roman rhetoric of oratory and, 128, 262n44 Titus Andronicus (Shakespeare) and, 127, 128, 129–30, 136, 138 Wells, Stanley, 279n4 Westminster Abbey, 87, 96–97, 98, 99, 100–101 Wey, William, 93, 94 Whetstone, George, 51–52 Whitchurch, Edward, 33 Whitgift, Thomas, 195 Whittingham, William, 29, 206, 279–80n6 Whore of Babylon, 45, 175 Widmanstadt, Johann Albrecht, 22 Wilkes, Sir Thomas, 36 Wilkins, George, 140, 265n2 Williams, Raymond, 208 The Winter’s Tale (Shakespeare). See also biblical allusion in, The Winter’s Tale (Shakespeare)

about, 13, 149, 156 annimation/reanimation and, 156–57, 159–61, 162, 166–67, 271n25 art versus nature in, 162–63, 164–65, 270–71n19, 271n20 bear imagery in, 161–62, 270n11 classical literature and, 157, 158, 161, 270n14 deer imagery in, 263–64n66 Delphos/Delos/Delphi and, 161, 270n14 disobedience/penitence in, 164, 165, 167 gods/goddesses in, 158, 161 human relationships and, 167 literary genres and, 149, 164 painted women/sexual immorality and, 163, 166 plot/composition issue and, 156, 269n1, 269n4 Pygmalion narrative in Metamorphoses (Ovid) and, 156, 157, 160–61, 166, 168 religious issues in, 157, 168, 270n8 respect virtue and, 225 reunions and, 164 Winthrop, John, 5, 231n11 wisdom literature, 226–29 Wittenberg Bibles, 21, 27–28 Womack, Peter, 153, 154 women Jerusalem’s personification and, 90, 128, 133 painted women/sexual immorality and, 163, 166, 270–71n19 as rulers, 206, 216–17 Scripture on role of, 206, 216, 279–80n6 word-against-word practice, 107–8, 111–13, 114, 117 Yorke, Sir John, 266–67n24 Zerubbabel (biblical figure), 5 Zurich Bibles, 21, 26, 27 Zwingli, Huldrych, 19, 20, 32, 56