The Bible on the Shakespearean Stage: Cultures of Interpretation in Reformation England. Edited by Thomas Fulton and Kristen Poole

Abstract

This stimulating collection takes up a subject that has been somewhat neglected in the “turn to religion” in Shakespeare studies: popular hermeneutics. The Reformation called on believers not only to read the Bible but also to interpret it; the introduction to the volume takes us into the worlds of Bible reading and interpretation and shows us how sixteenth- and seventeenth-century readers learned exegesis from notes and paratextual material in early modern Bibles, as well as from theological tracts and sermons that modeled typological reading, collocation, and ways of working with the densely figured “literal” narrative. To read about open-air sermons, attended by as many as six thousand people with Bibles in hand to check and annotate referenced passages, helps us imagine the attention and interpretive energy audiences might have brought to bear on Shakespeare’s plays in the theater. The volume is divided into four parts. Bruce Gordon’s and Aaron T. Pratt’s respective essays in the first part (“Europe, England: Contextualizing Shakespeare’s Bible”) historicize the discussion of biblical interpretation in the context of international linguistic scholarship and textual developments (Gordon) and publishing and marketing books in England (Pratt). Gordon’s essay provides valuable information on the work of Christian Hebraists, and notes the publication of a Rabbinic Bible in the period, but I would have liked some assessment of how this scholarship fed into the Geneva translation (the one most used in England), how it might illuminate the vexed question of Shakespeare’s attitude toward real Jews. Pratt studies translations of the New Testament, beginning with the extremely popular volume produced by Sir John Cheke (1553). The paratextual material in that edition provided continuity for the different authorized translations that circulated throughout the century, and Pratt explains that its function was to stress that the Bible should be understood within the context of the official church. If Shakespeare did work from a Cheke volume, as Pratt thinks possible, and was typical in that sense, the paratextual guides for interpretations did not constrain the uniqueness of his biblical readings and the originality of his theology.