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Steven Marx\u2019s Shakespeare and the Bible <\/em> (Oxford, 2000), purports to be the \u201cfirst book to explore the pattern and significance\u201d of Shakespeare\u2019s biblical allusions. Perhaps. The results are mixed. Each chapter of Marx\u2019s book attempts to show structural, plot, and thematic parallels between a section of Scripture and a play of Shakespeare: The Tempest <\/em> follows Genesis; Henry V is Moses and David; Lear <\/em> draws on Job; Measure for Measure <\/em> is indebted mainly to the gospels, and Merchant of Venice <\/em> to Romans; and The Tempest <\/em> makes a return appearance at the end because of its similarities with John\u2019s apocalyptic \u201cmasque.\u201d <\/p>\n He suggests too that a number of characters function as Godlike figures in Shakespeare\u2019s drama, with some surprising results: Yahweh \u201ctests Abraham and Jacob and Job with tricks and with cruel ordeals whose meanign and motive are hidden from them. He comes to save the world hidden in the person of a poor carpenter and allows himself to be crucified in order to convey a lesson to those who do not follow him and to those who do. Shakespeare\u2019s quasi-divine saviours frequently use such disguises. Henry V misleads his father, his bar-room buddies, his treacherous lords, his clery, his French enemies, and his reluctant bide, before he finally shows his hand. Edgar deceives his father in King Lear <\/em> with a fake exorcism and a false miracle to liberate him from suicidal pessimism. The Friar in Much Ado About Nothing <\/em> rescues a near-tragic situation of misunderstanding with a piour fraud leading to the final moment of revelation.\u201d <\/p>\n All this is very intriguing, if not quite convincing, and along the way Marx also offers numerous insights into the details of the plays: Henry\u2019s victory at Agincourt is like a new Exodus, celebrated with the singing of a hymn, which Holinshed refers to not as the Non Nobis (Psalm 115) but as In exitu Israel de Aegypto (Psalm 114), and Shylock\u2019s conversion points to the fulfillment of Paul\u2019s (and the Puritans\u2019) hope for the conversion of the Jews. <\/p>\n The weaknesses are several. He relies a great deal on Robert Alter\u2019s very helpful notion of \u201cglobal allusion,\u201d which Alter defines in part by saying that \u201cthe older text is not just something that the poet reads but something that possesses him, and the re-creation of the old work in the new is an effort to make sense of that experience of possession, to explain what cultural memory means.\u201d A global allusion doesn\u2019t just borrow here and there from an earlier text, but takes its basic architecture, themes, plots, characters, and so on from an earlier text \u2013 the way, for instance, that Virgil employed the Homeric epics or Joyce follows the Odyssey. <\/p>\n Some of what Marx sees as global allusions are strained, or the parallels are thinned out so much that they are not particularly illuminating. Revelation and The Tempest follow the same structure: an introduction of setting, a \u201cpageant of battles\u201d where good triumphs over evil, a new pageant of marriage and recreation, and a final vision. As Marx develops this, some of the detailed parallels are striking (eg, the drunk Whore resembles Caliban after Stefano gives him wine), but the overall pattern is so general \u2013 introductions, battles, wedding, finale \u2013 that it could fit dozens of texts. That\u2019s fine, of course; and I suspect one of the reasons his discussion of The Tempest and Revelation works as well as it does is because Revelation is so deeply archetypal a text. Put it this way: I don\u2019t have any problem with reading Shakespeare through biblical patterns; but Marx doesn\u2019t do it as well as it could be done. I suspect this is due to the fact, as he admits early on, that he came to the Bible rather late in life, after he had already been teaching Renaissance literature for a number of years. <\/p>\n I was also less than entranced by his frequent efforts to interpret the plays as ironic subversions of the Biblical texts quoted. No doubt Shakespeare does this; Falstaff quotes the Bible like a Puritan or a Lollard, but he\u2019s clearly quoting it hypocritically. Marx\u2019s discussion of Henry as a Machiavellian has its illuminating points \u2013 because Henry does have his Machiavellian side. But to suggest that Shakespeare engages in a kind of global irony is not convincing \u2013 not because Shakespeare was too orthodox to do that (though I think he was) but because these global ironies don\u2019t make sense of the plays. <\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Steven Marx\u2019s Shakespeare and the Bible (Oxford, 2000), purports to be the \u201cfirst book to explore the pattern and significance\u201d of Shakespeare\u2019s biblical allusions. Perhaps. The results are mixed. Each chapter of Marx\u2019s book attempts to show structural, plot, and thematic parallels between a section of Scripture and a play of Shakespeare: The Tempest follows […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3021,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2295","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-literature"],"yoast_head":"\n
Marx even hints that the First Folio established a \u201ccanon\u201d of Shakespeare plays that imitates the canon of the recently published King James Bible, moving from national, nearly Deuteronomic, history, to the tragic poetry of Lear-Job, through the gospels and Romans to Shakespeare\u2019s ending in Prospero. The original editors of the Folio even suggested that it represented a kind of \u201csecond coming\u201d: \u201cWe thought thee dead but this thy printed worth\/ Tells the spectators that thou wentst but forth\/ To enter with applause. An actor\u2019s art\/ Can die and live, to act a second part\/ That\u2019s but an exit of mortality\/ This a re-entrance to a plaudite.\u201d <\/p>\n