Enter the Book: Reading the Bible on the Early Modern Stage

Abstract

‘Enter HAMLET reading on a book’.1 What Shakespeare’s Prince might be reading in 2.2 of Hamlet, so ‘sadly’ and ‘like a wretch’ (2.2.169–70), has long been the subject of critical curiosity. Scholarly speculation ranges from the satires of Juvenal to the Essays of Montaigne, while just as plausibly Hamlet could be ruminating on his own ‘tables’ (if, that is, the actor playing the Prince produces a notebook of some kind in the soliloquy of 1.5).2 Yet, what if Hamlet were holding neither a work of philosophy nor a florilegium, but a Bible? Might we read the character, and the tragedy, of Prince Hamlet differently if his book were the Book? The purpose of this essay is not, of course, to attempt to prove that Hamlet’s prop in 2.2 is a copy of the Bible or its representational equivalent. More simply, my aim is to ask what it might mean for any character to read the Bible on the early modern stage, and what the ramifications of such an act might be. Reading the Bible as an object of drama – as an artefact of the material and spiritual cultures of early modern England – is our starting point. It is through the Book’s physical presence on the early modern stage that the performance of Biblereading – a performance rooted in questions of authority and power of various kinds – will be explored via two plays in particular: Christopher Marlowe’s Dr Faustus and Thomas Heywood’s If You Know Not Me, You Know Nobody.