Shakespearian Biography, Biblical Allusion and Early Modern Practices of Reading Scripture

Abstract

Modern narratives of Shakespeare's life have tended to expand our sense of the playwright's representativeness of his own culture in perhaps every area but one: his use of the Bible. The boundaries of this subject have long been shaped by two biographical assumptions about Shakespeare's encounters with scriptural texts: that they occurred mainly when he was a boy in school and later when he attended church services. Both assumptions have sedimented into part of our cultural memory of Shakespeare that no recent biographer, as far as I am aware, has questioned. They constitute what one might call, following Pierre Bourdieu, the historical field that determines the social value and scholarly production of Shakespeare's discursive relationship with the Bible. The critical result, evident in any modern edition, has been a reduction of Shakespeare's biblical references to the level of proverbial wisdom or unproblematic doctrine. These scholarly tendencies have been reinforced by wider cultural attitudes, such as long-standing admiration for the plays’ absence of religious dogma, as well as wariness of provoking outdated polemics or fanciful speculations about Shakespeare's personal beliefs. The current consensus has had the less desirable effect, however, of inhibiting historicized investigations of Shakespeare's biblical intertexts and early modern English culture, including potentially diverse responses by original spectators and readers to scriptural allusions in the plays. While modern scholars have catalogued scores of references to the Bible in Shakespeare, most of these remain untouched by recent theoretical discourses and cross-disciplinary methodologies which have transformed Shakespearian historicism in other areas, including early modern contexts of religious politics and the theatre.

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