Print Price: $53.95

Format:
Paperback
176 pp.
frontispiece, 135 mm x 203 mm

ISBN-13:
9780198184393

Publication date:
February 2000

Imprint: OUP UK

Shakespeare and the Bible

Steven Marx

Series : Oxford Shakespeare Topics

Oxford Shakespeare Topics provides students and teachers with short books on important aspects of Shakespeare criticism and scholarship. Each book is written by an authority in its field, and combines accessible style with original discussion of its subject. Notes and a critical guide to further reading equip the interested reader with the means to broaden research.

Despite the presence of hundreds of Biblical allusions in Shakespeare, this is the first book to explore the pattern and significance of those references in relation to a selection of his greatest plays. It reveals the Bible as a rich source for Shakespeare's uses of myth, history, comedy and tragedy, his techniques of staging, and his ways of characterizing rulers, magicians and teachers in the image of the Bible's multifaceted God. This book also discloses ways in which Shakespeare's plays offer both pious and irreverent interpretations of the Scriptures comparable to those presented by his contemporary writers, artists, philosophers and politicians.

After an opening chapter comparing the Bible as a fragmented yet unified collection of 46 books with the fragmented yet unified First Folio collection of Shakespeare's 36 plays, each of the following six chapters matches a book of the Bible with a representative play: the creation myth of Genesis with the first play in the Folio, The Tempest, the historical epic of Exodus with Henry V, the tragedy of Job with King Lear, the tragicomedy of the Gospel of Matthew with Measure for Measure, the homiletic disputation of Paul's Epistle to the Romans with The Merchant of Venice, and the apocalyptic masque of the Book of Revelation with The Tempest again.

Though its subject matter and style appeal to a broad audience, this book is grounded in recent scholarship in Shakespeare and Biblical studies. Its intertextual readings are framed by descriptions of the historical circumstances of each work's composition and reception and by an emergent theory of allusion as a principle of creation and understanding.

Readership : Shakespeare students at advanced undergraduate level, teachers of Shakespeare in schools.

Reviews

• `Steven Marx's contribution to the Oxford Shakespeare Topics series is admirably accessible to both students and teachers, its intended audience. Scholars will find useful insights into how Shakespeare mined scripture for characterization, theme, allusion, and even dramatic structure in six major plays.'
  Janet M. Spencer, Wingate University, Sixteenth Century Journal XXXII/1
• `Marx's most original contribution is his discussion of The Tempest, one of Shakespeare's few plays with no known source for the main plot, in two separate chapters examining the play's relationship to Genesis and Revelation'
  Sixteenth Century Journal
• `The connection between Job and Lear has been explored in previous literature, but Marx's solid analysis of the works' shared doctrinal positions, linguistic parallels, and plot elements provides a strong example of Shakespeare's adaptations of biblical tragedy ... This book provides fresh readings that illuminate both the biblical text and the plays, works too often limited by received ideas, and suggests avenues for future study of Shakespeare's use of the Bible.'
  Janet M. Spencer, Wingate University, Sixteenth Century Journal XXXII/1
• `'a welcome, creative exploration of Scripture's bearing on the Bard, an Elizabethan humanist who transposed biblical theology into an anthropological key.''
  C. Clifton Black, Princeton Theological Seminary, Princeton, NJ
• `This informed and useful discussion of the Bible's influence upon and interpretation by Shakespeare ... offers a brief but substantial consideration of the importance of biblical knowledge to Shakespeare's greatest plays ... The series's aim, which Marx's brief book admirably achieves, is to inform and provoke, to provide close reading and critical analysis ... As such, it informs serious first-time readers of Shakespeare's plays while offering numerous avenues of further pursuit ... Marx's contribution to the Oxford series effectively achieves the series's stated aims in a lively and engaging sequence of close readings in context. Students and teachers will doubtless find much of interest here, and, indeed, every teacher of Shakespeare and of the Bible in literature would likely profit from Marx's careful and accessible observations and insights.'
  Catherine S. Cox, University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown, South Atlantic Review
• `exhibits the virtues that are appropriate to its genre as part of the Oxford Shakespeare Topics series. It is a beautifully organized introduction to the issues that it addresses. It is a tribute to Marx to have covered so much territory so succinctly,. Within its limited scope the book is admirably researched and provides a helpful guide to rival critical traditions on various plays and issues. Marx is a master of the apt formula, and he is at his best in finding patterns and motifs in texts.'
  Leland Rykin, Wheaton College, Christianity and Literature