The Bible in Shakespeare

Hannibal Hamlin author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Oxford University Press

Published:1st Feb '18

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The Bible in Shakespeare cover

Despite the widespread popular sense that the Bible and the works of Shakespeare are the two great pillars of English culture, and despite the long-standing critical recognition that the Bible was a major source of Shakespeare's allusions and references, there has never been a full-length, critical study of the Bible in Shakespeare's plays. The Bible in Shakespeare addresses this serious deficiency. Early chapters describe the post-Reformation explosion of Bible translation and the development of English biblical culture, compare the Church and the theater as cultural institutions (particularly in terms of the audience's auditory experience), and describe in general terms Shakespeare's allusive practice. Later chapters are devoted to interpreting Shakespeare's use of biblical allusion in a wide variety of plays, across the spectrum of genres: King Lear and Job, Macbeth and Revelation, the Crucifixion in the Roman Histories, Falstaff's anarchic biblical allusions, and variations on Adam, Eve, and the Fall throughout Shakespeare's dramatic career, from Romeo and Juliet to The Winter's Tale. The Bible in Shakespeare offers a significant new perspective on Shakespeare's plays, and reveals how the culture of early modern England was both dependent upon and fashioned out of a deep engagement with the interpreted Bible. The book's wide-ranging and interdisciplinary nature will interest scholars in a variety of fields: Shakespeare and English literature, allusion and intertextuality, theater studies, history, religious culture, and biblical interpretation. With growing scholarly interest in the impact of religion on early modern culture, the time is ripe for such a publication.

One of the many excellent features of Hannibal Hamlin's introduction to The Bible in Shakespeare is his emphasis on the spoken as well as the written word... In a book happily free of fashionable jargon, and intended for the "educated general reader as well as the academic community", Hamlin passes from a survey of Shakespears's allusive practices to a detailed study of his use of Gensis 1-3. * Gerard Kilroy, Times Literary Supplement *
The book is well presented and standards of copy-editing are good ... The Bible in Shakespeare is a fine study that deserves a wide audience. Hamlin is an excellent guide to this fascinating terrain, and his book opens up new avenues of enquiry that Shakespearean and early modern scholars will want to pursue further. * Adrian Streete, Review of English Studies *
Hamlin is a gifted reader of Wisdom literature and its precocious modernism ... This is a major book that establishes new readings of individual plays as well as an approach to biblical culture that is ready to be developed freshly in other contexts. * Julia Reinhard Lupton, SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 *
Hamlin has built an impressive (and I suspect indispensable) bridge between two of the world's desert-island books. * Rev Dr Paul Edmondson, Around the Globe *

ISBN: 9780198817413

Dimensions: 216mm x 141mm x 22mm

Weight: 496g

400 pages