The Bible in Shakespeare

Abstract

The Bible in Shakespeare is the first full-length critical study of biblical allusion in Shakespeare’s plays. There is no book Shakespeare alludes to more often, more significantly, and in every play he wrote, than the Bible. Shakespeare was a serious, if sometimes skeptical, Bible reader, but he knew too that he could count on his audience recognizing and understanding biblical allusions, since Elizabethan and Jacobean culture was pervasively biblical. The book describes this biblical culture, and offers fresh and sometimes surprising interpretations of many of Shakespeare’s plays by reading his biblical allusions in the context of interpretations of Scripture available to him and his audience. Allusions to the Bible sometimes connect to the religious concerns of early modern England, but, in an age when the sacred and secular were inextricably intertwined, biblical characters, stories, and ideas were understood to connect to most areas of human life: love, sex, and marriage, history and politics, law and finance, jealousy, betrayal, murder, suffering, and sacrifice, gardening, medicine, and science. Shakespeare’s allusions to the Bible do not imply any particular religiosity on his part, nor are they evidence for his personal beliefs. Allusion was one of Shakespeare’s most essential literary devices, and allusions to the Bible are one his best methods of engaging his audience and enhancing the meaning of his plays.

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