Shakespeare and Abraham by Ken Jackson

Abstract

Reviewed by: Shakespeare and Abraham by Ken Jackson Andrew Hiltzik Ken Jackson, Shakespeare and Abraham (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press 2015) 176 pp. The great body of scholarly research on Shakespeare perhaps exceeds that of any other author of the English language. It is undeniably difficult, in this age, to say anything sweeping and broad. There is still space, however, to fill in certain gaps in our understanding with needle-pointed research questions. It is this approach that Ken Jackson takes with “Shakespeare and Abraham,” a thorough study on the influence of this Biblical narrative—that of a father willing to sacrifice his son at God’s command—on a broad range of Shakespeare plays. Jackson’s approach is not just a philological overview of overt references to Genesis, chapter 22; he makes the so-called Binding of Isaac emblematic of Shakespeare’s philosophical struggles with the “relationships between religion, sovereignty, law, and justice” (2). Jackson starts not with Shakespeare himself, but with the role of Abraham’s sacrifice in Elizabethan culture. In chapter 1, “The Wakefield Cycle Play and the Interpretive Tradition,” Jackson addresses the representation of Abraham in popular theater, with particular attention to a unique rendition in which Abraham’s gesture comes across with a certain homicidal pathos—notably, in this version Abraham neglects to tell his son the reason for his actions. Though many scholars regard this version as progressively “naturalistic and psychological rather than religious” (24), Jackson recognizes a hyper-religious impulse in Abraham’s characterization—one so removed from the secular mind that it is almost “impossible to comprehend” (30). To explain himself, Jackson makes recourse to the philosophy of Kierkegaard, Kant, and Hegel, each of whom wrote extensively on this biblical episode. Kant believed that Abraham should never have obeyed God, because he had no way of confirming that the voice he heard was God’s. Moreover, he adds, “‘We ought … to do a thing not because God wills it, but because it is righteous and good in itself—and it is because it is good in itself that God wills it and demands it of us” (32). In Kant’s mind, Abraham’s natural righteousness should have allowed him to see through the test. For Hegel, on the other hand, this episode represents “one of [End Page 290] many flawed Jewish events or stories that inhibited the attempts of Jesus to bring people to consciousness of the divine” (33), an illustration of the mental blocks that may inhibit one from perceiving “the light and the true way.” Kierkegaard, finally, goes against Hegel to argue that Abraham’s gesture is not really a decision at all, and can hardly be judged on moral grounds: “God’s absolute demand to kill exceeds any sense we might have of the ethical, or right … to translate that absolute, singular demand into a recognizable human code compromises the nature of the demand, transferring it to the realm of what Kierkegaard terms the ‘ethical’ and/or ‘universal’” (34). Jackson will adopt the Kierkegaardian notion of the “Other” as a framework for his approach to Shakespeare, as well as what Derrida calls “religion without religion”—that is, some connection to a transcendent alterity not necessarily founded on Christianity. Abraham’s “impossible” decision to sacrifice his only son at the behest of his only God becomes a basis for Shakespeare’s contemplation of various forms of sacrifice on behalf of some ineffable Other, be it God, the state, duty, etc. Jackson dives into Shakespeare proper in chapter 2: “Weak Sovereignty and Genesis 22 in 3 Henry VI and King John.” Both plays contain instances of filicide or violence (actual or symbolic) against children, making them particularly suited to an Abrahamic comparison. According to Jackson, Shakespeare turns to Abraham for reasons of dramatic expediency, as “piety lacks a certain theatrical force, even in religious cultures” (43). The Abrahamic sacrifice is one of the only topoi in Western culture where the (attempted) murder of a child can be cast in a positive light. In Henry VI Part 3, the vengeful murder of York’s son by Lord Clifford parallels the symbolic violence Henry does to his son, by disinheriting him...