Early Modern

CHAPTER 16

William Shakespeare

Hannibal Hamlin

Although Measure for Measure has an overtly biblical title (from Matthew 7:2, “with what measure ye meate, it shalbe measured to you agayne”), Shakespeare did not write any biblical dramas along the lines of George Peele’s David and Bethsabe or Robert Greene’s (lost) The History or Tragedy of Job. Nor did he contribute to the popular genre of biblical paraphrase that interested so many Renaissance poets, including Wyatt and Surrey, Gascoigne, Philip and Mary Sidney, Spenser (though his paraphrases are lost), the Fletchers, Crashaw, Herbert, and Milton. Yet despite his wide reading in classical and early modern literature, Shakespeare alludes to no book so often as the Bible, and it is in terms of allusion – direct or indirect reference by means of recognizably biblical language, situation, or scenic arrangement – that Shakespeare should be considered a biblical writer. All of his plays and many of his poems contain significant biblical allusions. Some plays, like The Comedy of Errors, The Merchant of Venice, and Hamlet, are not fully comprehensible without some biblical knowledge. This is hardly surprising, since the Bible was the most important book in Shakespeare’s culture. The Protestant Reformation had brought about a wave of Bible translation; Shakespeare and his audience were in only the second generation of those able to read and listen to the Bible in English. The experience of the English Bible was still new and exciting, and the many translations and editions of the Bible produced during Shakespeare’s lifetime testify to people’s eagerness to read the Scripture in their own tongue.

There were many English translations of the Bible in the sixteenth century, but the two most important for Shakespeare were the Geneva Bible, translated by Protestant exiles during the reign of the Catholic Queen Mary and first published in Geneva in 1560, and the Bishops’ Bible, translated under the leadership of Archbishop Matthew Parker, and published in 1568. According to the Elizabethan Injunctions of 1559, every church in England was to have a copy of the whole Bible, in English, in the largest format available. From 1568 on, it was the Bishops’ Bible that served this official function, being read in church services across the country. Shakespeare, like everyone else, was required by law to attend church on Sundays and holy days, and he would therefore have heard much of the Bible read aloud in the Bishops’ version. Despite the official status of the Bishops’ Bible, however, the Geneva Bible remained the most popular in print. This was partly because it was produced in small, relatively inexpensive formats, but also because it came with a helpful editorial apparatus for the common reader. In addition to maps, guides to reading, biblical chronologies, and useful indices, hundreds of marginal notes guided the reader on matters of language and interpretation, and also pointed the reader to relevant passages in other parts of the Bible.

Many of Shakespeare’s biblical allusions use the language of the Geneva Bible. As You Like It, for instance, is one of many Elizabethan plays that allude to the Parable of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15). When Orlando says to his brother, “Shall I keep your hogs and eat husks with them?” (1.1.37–8),¹ Shakespeare’s audience would have recognized the allusion to Luke 15:16, “And he wolde faine have filled his bellie with the huskes, that the swine ate: but no man gave them him.” But only the Geneva Bible, not the Bishops’, has the word “husks.” There are also cases where Shakespeare alludes to biblical passages in wording that derives from the Bishops’ Bible. In Richard II, for instance, Mowbray declares, “if ever I were traitor, / My name be blotted from the book of life” (1.3.201–2). The allusion is to Revelation 3:5, “I will not blot out his name out of the booke of life,” but only the Bishops’ translation uses “blot.” The other Bible translations use “put out” (Shaheen, 1999, pp. 38–48). It is clear therefore that Shakespeare was reading the Bible on his own in the Geneva translation, but also hearing the Bishops’ in church.

Shakespeare was also familiar with the version of the Psalms translated by Miles Coverdale for the Great Bible of 1539. Long after this Bible had ceased to be widely used, Coverdale’s Psalms continued to be regularly bound with the Book of Common Prayer and were therefore the English Psalms used most often in worship. In The Merry Wives of Windsor, Pistol says of Falstaff that “He woos both high and low, both rich and poor, / Both young and old, one with another” (2.1.113–14). This fine sentence, with its rhetorical antitheses, is taken from Psalm 49: “High and lowe, rich and poore: one with another” (verse 2). The Geneva Bible does not use the phrase “one with another,” while the Bishops’ Bible, which does have it, doesn’t have the parallelism of the several antitheses (“As well lowe as high: riche and poore”). Pistol’s language clearly adheres most closely to the Prayer Book version.

There are few biblical books to which Shakespeare does not allude. This applies as well to the Apocrypha, which were included in Elizabethan Bibles and in the proper lessons of the Book of Common Prayer. Some books, like Genesis, Exodus, Samuel, Job, and the Gospels, are the richest in character and narrative. Others, like Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, the Apocryphal books Wisdom and Ecclesiasticus, and the New Testament Epistles, indicate Shakespeare’s interest in philosophical ideas. His extensive use of the Psalms (more than any other biblical book) shows an attraction to their powerful poetic language. Furthermore, some biblical passages were natural loci for topics of concern in early modern England or that Shakespeare was exploring in particular plays. For instance, early modern Christians considering the nature of love, marriage, or relationships between the sexes, the core subjects of comedy, would naturally turn to the seminal story of Adam and Eve in Genesis 1–3, as well as to some of the pertinent writings of Paul. For the biblically minded, the subject of kingship or government, on the other hand, the focus of Shakespeare’s English Histories, would naturally suggest the stories of Saul, David, and other Old Testament rulers. Similarly, for Shakespeare and his contemporaries the ultimate model of human suffering and persecution, in various configurations the subject matter of tragedy, was that of Jesus in the Gospels.

It is important to recognize that his reading of the Bible doesn’t necessarily mean Shakespeare was more pious than his contemporaries, nor does it indicate the specifics of his particular religious beliefs. But, for a writer interested in good material, the Bible was a particularly rich source for complex and fascinating characters and stories not just of faith, but of love, heroism, battle, and betrayal – even incest, fratricide, idolatry, and genocide. The story of Susannah and the Elders, for instance, one of the apocryphal additions to the Book of Daniel, was very popular. Shakespeare alludes to the decisive judgment of Daniel against the Elders in The Merchant of Venice (4.1.223–4), but for many readers some of the appeal of the story probably lay in Susannah’s naked bathing. (A similarly titillating scene, Bathsheba’s bathing that King David spies on in 2 Samuel 11:2, was often visually reproduced, gratuitously, in Renaissance Bibles, prayer books, and psalters).

The Bible was not only the foundation of Christian religious worship and belief, it was also the basis of English popular culture. Biblical characters and episodes were depicted on painted cloths hung in the local tavern, on dinner plates, purses, jewelry, swords, and furniture. Biblical ballads like “When Jesus Christ Was Twelve” were among those sold by real-life pedlars like Shakespeare’s Autolycus in The Winter’s Tale. Regular church attendance meant that everyone heard hundreds of sermons explaining biblical texts, and the packed crowds (in the thousands) at public open-air sermons at places like Paul’s Cross in London suggest that this was a popular entertainment, not just something to be endured on Sunday mornings. The great preachers of the day, such as Lancelot Andrewes or Henry “Silvertongued” Smith, were celebrities. The Bible pervaded virtually every aspect of culture, shaping ideas not just about religion, but about politics, marriage and social relations, trade and exploration, warfare, agriculture, even astronomy and medicine.

Allusions to the Bible in Shakespeare’s writing sometimes come indirectly by way of the church liturgy, sermons, commentaries, or religious art and literature. When Hamlet condemns the player who “out-Herods Herod,” for instance (3.2.14), he is on the one hand referring to the Jewish King from Matthew’s Gospel account of the Nativity, but he is more specifically alluding to the traditionally bombastic acting associated with the character of Herod in the English Mystery plays. A liturgical allusion can be observed in King John, when Constance says to Queen Elinor, “This is thy eldest son’s son … / Thy sins are visited in this poor child” (2.1.177–9). The ultimate source of these lines is Exodus, in which God is said to visit “the iniquitie [“sinne” in Bishops’] of the fathers upon the children, upon the third generation” (Exodus 20:5). But Shakespeare likely also had in mind the repetition of the second commandment in the Communion Service. In the latter, for instance, the wording is closer to Shakespeare’s: “For I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, and visit the sin of the fathers upon the children, unto the third and fourth generation.” The wording used in the Catechism, which all children learned in school, is even closer, since it has the plural “sins” (Shaheen, 1999, p. 393). So, while the commandments were obviously biblical, they may have been more familiar to Shakespeare and his audience from schoolroom rote exercises or the liturgy.

Furthermore, the Bible is only one of many sources flowing into Shakespeare’s creative imagination, so that references to biblical stories and characters sometimes exist alongside, or even intertwine with, those from Classical or Renaissance literature or English folklore. It was an age when people could believe both that England was the new Israel, God’s chosen Protestant kingdom on earth, and that it was founded by Brute, the grandson of Aeneas, hero of Virgil’s Aeneid and survivor from the fall of Troy. One of Shakespeare’s most culturally scrambled, or syncretic, plays is A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which takes place in ancient Athens, yet combines characters out of Greek myth, young Greek lovers (who really seem to be Renaissance Italian), fairies from English folklore, and tradesmen seemingly from the streets of Elizabethan London. One of the latter, Bottom the Weaver, is magically given the head of an ass as part of Oberon’s revenge plot. Eventually, Bottom’s enchanted body is restored to normal, and he wakes up to reflect on the “dream” he believes he has had:

I have had a most rare vision. I have had a dream, past the wit of man to say what dream it was. Man is but an ass, if he go about t’expound this dream. Methought I was – there is no man can tell what. Methought I was, and methought I had – but man is but a patch’d fool, if he will offer to say what methought I had. The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report, what my dream was. (4.1.205–14)

Bottom’s speech seems like nonsense, but the humor and its meaning is intensified if one recognizes its allusion to Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians:

The eye hathnot seen, & the eare hath not heard, neither haue entred into the heart of man, the thynges which God hath prepared for them that loue hym. (1 Corinthians 2:9, Bishops’ Bible)

Bottom is not simply scrambling senses, or mixing up nouns and verbs, he is parodying Paul’s description of the wondrous mysteries of God’s love. Bottom himself cannot be conscious of either the allusion or the parody, since, despite his English appearance and language, he is supposedly living in pre-Christian Athens. Yet when the audience catches the allusion, the scene is enriched in complex ways. For example, in one sense “Bottom’s Dream,” which “hath no bottom,” is nonsense, since eyes can never hear, and ears can never see. In another sense, however, Bottom’s experience could be said to be even more transcendent than the one described by Paul. In Paul’s description, the mysteries of God’s love are beyond anything the eye has seen or the ear heard; Bottom’s dream goes beyond even what we can conceive, let alone experience, since we simply cannot imagine eyes hearing, ears seeing, or hands tasting. Bottom’s dream is truly extrasensory. Ultimately, despite its biblical allusions, A Midsummer Night’s Dream is not a “Christian” play in any narrow sense. After all, the Pauline allusion is used to describe Bottom’s experience among the fairies, as he and his fellow mechanicals prepare for the wedding in Athens of an Amazon queen and the half-son of the god Poseidon.

Shakespeare alludes to the Bible in a variety of modes and with a variety of effects. Some allusions, for example, are comical, whereas others are acutely serious. One disturbingly serious example is Iago’s statement in Othello, “I am not what I am” (1.1.65). The allusion is to the name of God in Exodus 3. Having been called to bring Israel out of Egypt, Moses asks God by what name he should be identified. God replies, “I AM THAT I AM,” the English rendering (in the Geneva Bible) of the Hebrew Tetragrammaton, the four letters that are also rendered as “YHWH,” “Yahweh,” or “Jehovah.” Though the latter renderings may seem like names, God is in fact refusing to be named. God has no need of a name, because he is the one and only God, and does not need to be differentiated from other “gods.” God’s answer to Moses also indicates God’s eternal immutability; in the Hebrew, verbs have no tense, so it could also mean, “I am what I was,” “I will be what I am,” and every other possible permutation. God is, has been, and always will be just what he is. Iago’s allusion inverts this. Not only is he not what he seems to be, in keeping with his prior admission that his “outward action” does not “demonstrate / The native act and figure of my heart” (1.1.61–2). But he actually is not what he is, which is on the one hand a logical impossibility, but on the other an expression of utter negation and vacuity. In other words, if God is ultimate plenitude, then Iago is absolute emptiness. Shakespeare’s audience would likely have remembered this allusion, when, at the end of the play, Othello says of Iago, “I look down towards his feet; but that’s a fable” (5.2.286). Othello half-expects to see the cloven hooves normally included in depictions of the Devil. For the audience, Iago’s devilishness has already been established through the earlier allusion: as the one who is not what he is, Iago is the opposite of God. Iago isn’t really the Devil, but the allusions that represent him as such enhance the sense of his undiluted wickedness.

By contrast, the passage from The Merry Wives of Windsor cited above is an example of a light, comical allusion. Another example can be observed in The Winter’s Tale, when the Clown (i.e. country bumpkin) says to the conman Autolycus, “We are but plain fellows, sir.” Autolycus replies, “A lie; you are rough and hairy” (4.4.721–22). The audience laughs not only at the obvious insult, which puns on the two senses of “plain” (simple and smooth-skinned), but at the clever allusion to the story of Jacob and Esau. Jacob says to Rebecca, “Beholde, Esau my brother is a heary man, and I am smoothe” (Genesis 27:11; here Shakespeare blends together the Bishops’ Bible and the Geneva, since the former has “heary” and the latter “rough”). The allusion is meaningful, since Jacob’s statement comes just before he tricks his brother out of his birthright. (Rebecca puts animal skins on Jacob’s arms to make him seem “heary” to his blind father, Isaac.) Since Autolycus is a trickster too, the allusion draws an appropriate parallel.

Shakespeare’s biblical allusions may also be roughly classified in terms of their relative conspicuousness and the greater or lesser extent of their implications for a given play. The most conspicuous allusions are outright quotations from or references to the Bible, in which the character making the allusion is fully conscious of making it. If Othello does indeed compare himself to “the base Judean” just before he kills himself (5.2.347 in the Folio; this is a notorious textual crux), and if “Judean” refers to Judas Iscariot, who betrayed Christ, this would be a good example. Othello, realizing he has betrayed the person who most loved him, compares himself to the biblical exemplar of treachery and betrayal. Another conscious reference occurs in Henry IV, Part One, when Falstaff cites Paul’s injunction, “Let everie man abide in the same vocation wherein he was called” (1 Corinthians 7:20), in support of following his own “vocation” of thievery (1.2.104–5). Falstaff is a stage parody of the stereotypical Puritan, often quoting Scripture, but, in his case, usually to blasphemous or self-serving purposes (Poole, 2000, pp. 16–44).

Some instances of biblical language in Shakespeare’s plays are simply cases of biblical idioms having become commonplace or proverbial in English speech. In Timon of Athens, for instance, Timon curses the young, calling on “Lust, and liberty” to infect them, so that “’gainst the stream of virtue they may strive, / And drown themselves in riot!” (4.1.25–8). While Ecclesiasticus does indeed urge its readers to “strive … not against the streame,” there was also a popular English proverb, “It is hard to strive against the stream.” So Shakespeare’s reference may be to one or the other source – or both (Shaheen, 1999, p. 677). Similarly, in Twelfth Night, Feste says to the Duke, trying to joke another coin from him, “Put your grace in your pocket, sir, for this once, and let your flesh and blood obey it” (5.1.32–3). The phrase “flesh and blood” is scriptural (Matthew 16:17, 1 Corinthians 15:50, etc.; the earliest citations in the OED are from Bible translations), but it had become a popular idiom long before Shakespeare used it, and no biblical allusion seems especially relevant or meaningful here. On the other hand, it can be difficult to distinguish the commonplace from the allusive with any precision. In Titus Andronicus Tamora likens a king (specifically Saturninus) to an eagle that “suffers little birds to sing” while knowing it could silence them with “the shadow of his wings” (4.4.85). The phrase “shadow of his wings” occurs in a number of Psalms (17:8, 36:7, 57:1, 63:7, the Geneva note to 143:9) as an image of divine protection, but it may, like “flesh and blood,” have become a commonplace (Shaheen, 1999, pp. 506–7). However, knowing the biblical context of Tamora’s phrase, that it is a metaphor for God’s protection and grace, ironizes her advice about “imperious” monarchy, which is not about mercy but about the arrogant expression of absolute power.

Some of Shakespeare’s biblical allusions illuminate a single speech or short scene. One of these localized allusions, for example, occurs in Macbeth’s soliloquy deliberating the murder of Duncan. He begins, “If it were done, when ’tis done, then ’twere well / It were done quickly” (1.7.1–2). An attentive listener or reader might hear behind these lines Jesus’ words to Judas after Satan had “entred into him”: “That thou doest, do quickely” (John 13:27). As in the example from Othello cited above, Macbeth is here allusively linked to Judas, the exemplar of betrayal. This further undermines any justification Macbeth can offer for the murder of his king. Another localized allusion occurs in Romeo and Juliet, when Juliet, on hearing that Romeo has killed her cousin Tybalt, calls her lover a “wolvish ravening lamb” (3.2.76). The audience would have recognized the well known metaphor of hypocrisy from the Gospel of Matthew: “Beware of false Prophets, which come to you in sheepes clothing, but inwardely they are ravening wolves” (Matthew 7:15). But, while adding weight to Juliet’s bitter outburst, the allusion doesn’t resonate far beyond this scene; even within a few lines, Juliet’s love for Romeo has reasserted itself.

By contrast, many of Shakespeare’s biblical allusions have a substantial impact, connecting to predominant themes of a given play, especially when they are links in an allusive chain involving the same or related biblical passages. Such extended patterns of allusions are woven into a number of the plays, including Coriolanus, Richard II, and Pericles. (On the first two, see Hamlin 2002, 2004, pp. 242–5.) In Pericles, for example, a series of allusions invokes the Book of Jonah. Initially, the shipwrecked Pericles is cast up on the shores of Pentapolis. Three fisherman discuss the wreck of his ship, which they have just witnessed. They compare human society to the sea that they know so well, and one describes a miser as being like a whale:

I can compare our rich misers to nothing so fitly as to a whale: a plays and tumbles, driving the poor fry before him, and at last devours them all at a mouthful. Such whales have I heard on a’th’land, who never leave gaping till they swallowed the whole parish, church, steeple, bells, and all. (2.1.28-32)

To this the second fisherman replies that “if I had been sexton I would have been that day in the belfry,” explaining further,

Because he should have swallowed me too, and when I had been in his belly, I would have kept such a jangling of bells that he should never have left till he cast bells, steeple, church, and parish up again. (2.1.34–40)

The social satire here is clear enough, but the fisherman’s little allegory also suggests the biblical story of Jonah, who was swallowed by a fish and then cast up again on land. (The fishermen – who, living in ancient Pentapolis, are presumably pagans – are not conscious of their allusions to Jonah, but the audience is.) Pericles, who is listening unseen, has just been through an experience at least somewhat similar to the Old Testament prophet’s: both characters have had misfortune at sea, yet are ultimately tossed up on land.

Later in Pericles, Shakespeare alludes more overtly to Jonah. Once again, Pericles is on the sea, this time with his new wife Thaisa, who is pregnant with his child. Another storm blows up that threatens to sink their ship, and Pericles, following the traditional equating of a storm with the voice or hand of the divine, calls on the powers behind the storm to break it off. The excitement sends Thaisa into premature labor, and she gives birth to a girl, seemingly at the cost of her own life. Alerting the audience to the symbolic implications of his own journey – the life-as-a-sea-voyage metaphor – Pericles refers to his “poor infant,” soon to be named Marina after the sea that gave her birth, as “this fresh new seafarer” (3.1.42). Without giving him time to grieve, however, the superstitious sailors insist that the body of Thaisa must be cast overboard, since

the sea works high,

The wind is loud and will not lie till the ship

Be cleared of the dead. (3.1.48–50)

In other words, the sailors see the body of Thaisa as a source of bad luck at sea, what early modern mariners actually termed a “Jonah” in reference to the bad luck brought on by the errant prophet (OED). Thaisa’s body is thus jettisoned, and Pericles’s eulogy makes the parallel with Jonah explicit:

A terrible child-bed hast thou had, my dear:

…

The air-remaining lamps, the belching whale,

And humming water must o’erwhelm thy corpse

Lying with simple shells. (3.1.56–64)

Although she doesn’t actually end up in the belly of whale, Thaisa is indeed belched up out of the “belly” of the sea. As Cerimon, the physician who saves her, puts it: “If the sea’s stomach be o’ercharged with gold, / ’Tis a good constraint of fortune it belches upon us” (3.2.53–4).

Such references to Jonah add more than superficial resonance to Pericles. The key lies in the tradition of typological reading of the Bible, the way in which characters, episodes, or language from the Old Testament were interpreted by Christians as prefiguring their “fulfillment” in the New Testament. Shakespeare’s allusions therefore often suggest chains of association between biblical verses, books, and testaments, reflecting a widespread habit of reading Scripture that George Herbert described: “This verse marks that, and both do make a motion / Unto a third, that ten leaves off doth lie.”² Traditionally, Christians interpreted Jonah’s three days in the whale and his escape typologically, as a foreshadowing of Christ’s death and resurrection. This interpretation was reinforced in the marginal glosses to the Book of Jonah in the Geneva Bible. However, the ultimate source for reading Jonah as a type of Christ comes from Christ’s own words:

Then answered certeine of the Scribes and of the Pharises, saying, Master, we wolde se a signe of thee. But he answered, and said to them, An evil and adulterous generacion seketh a signe, but no signe shal be give unto it, save the signe of the Prophet Jonas. For as Jonas was thre dayes, and thre nights in the whales bellie: so shal the Sonne of man be thre dayes and thre nights in the heart of the earth. (Matthew 12:38–40)

Given the typological association of Jonah’s “resurrection” with Christ’s, then, the allusions to Jonah in Pericles seem significant not only in relation to Pericles himself but also for Thaisa. First, Thaisa’s body is a “Jonah,” the offensive passenger who must be cast overboard into the “belly” of the sea in order to satisfy the “god of this great vast.” Like Jonah, she is cast up on shore, and like both Jonah and Jesus, she “dies” and is miraculously brought back to life. The allusion does not seem to suggest that Thaisa is a “Christ-figure.” Instead, it reinforces the sense that there is something miraculous and mysterious about Thaisa’s “resurrection,” while nevertheless remaining in the fantastical, and secular, realm of Romance.

Shakespeare’s biblical allusions sometimes operate ironically, in the sense that the dramatic characters themselves cannot be aware of the biblical sources of their own words. In plays such as Pericles, the Roman plays, or those featuring pagan characters, such as King Lear, the time period and geographical setting make biblical awareness on the part of the characters historically impossible. The allusions are thus deliberately anachronistic. This would have seemed less puzzling to Shakespeare’s audience than it may to us, however. For an early modern Christian audience, for instance, any experience of extreme suffering or sacrifice would inevitably have been compared, on some level, to the ultimate model of sacrifice in the Crucifixion of Christ. This applied even to characters who lived before the time of Christ, like Thaisa, Cordelia, or Julius Caesar, since for those Christians the Bible was held to contain truths that were universal and eternal. When pre-Christian characters such as Adam, David, and Jonah were understood as types foreshadowing Christ, then comparing other pre-Christian (but non-biblical) pagans to Christ would have been seen as typologically or morally valid rather than historically anachronistic.

Another function of Shakespeare’s biblical allusions is that they often concern matters of character, suggesting parallels between a dramatic character and a biblical one. The allusions comparing Thaisa with Jonah, or Orlando with the Prodigal Son, are examples of this technique. A number of characters, like Coriolanus and Julius Caesar, are compared through allusions with Christ himself, usually to the disadvantage of the character on stage (Fisch, 1999, pp. 3–33; Hamlin, 2002). In fact, Shakespeare frequently uses allusions in this way: to emphasize contrast rather than similarity. Often the dramatic irony involved in characters making allusions of which they are not conscious is intensified by the contrastive effect of the allusion, the biblical background undercutting the conscious intention of the speech in which it occurs. Such an example is found in Hamlet. Claudius, believing he is alone, meditates on his crime of murdering his brother and wonders about the possibility of God’s forgiveness:

What if this cursed hand

Were thicker than itself with brother’s blood,

Is there not rain enough in the sweet heavens

To wash it white as snow? (3.3.45–6)

Though Claudius shows no signs of being aware of it, these lines allude to Psalm 51, “wash me, and I shalbe whiter then snowe” (verse 7). The authorship of Psalm 51 was traditionally attributed to King David as the expression of his guilt and contrition after having committed adultery with Bathsheba and ordering her husband Uriah’s death (2 Samuel 11). Shakespeare’s allusion is appropriate, since Claudius is another king, guilty of murder and (perhaps) adultery with the wife of his victim (at least he has married his victim’s wife). Yet, while David was genuinely contrite (according to the Psalm, this requires a “broken and contrite heart”), Claudius only feels regret and cannot bring himself to repent. Furthermore, he is not willing to give up the spoils of his crime. (The attentive Bible reader might note that David gets unfair special treatment: he actually keeps Bathsheba after all. This point was generally ignored in traditional interpretations of the story.) Thus, the biblical allusion is primarily contrastive, ultimately underscoring the profound dissimilarity between the kings Claudius and David.

Another allusion in the same speech affirms Claudius’s persistent sinfulness; this allusion works in a non-contrastive way. In describing his offense, Claudius says that “It hath the primal eldest curse upon’t, / A brother’s murder” (3.3.37–8), a straightforward reference to the murder of Abel by Cain in Genesis 4. His previous reference to “brother’s blood” similarly recalls the blood of Abel that God says “cryeth unto me from the grounde” (Genesis 4:10). These are not the first allusions to Cain, however, since in 1.2, Claudius tries to console Hamlet, saying reason has cried that death “must be so” from “the first corse till he that died to-day” (1.2.104–6). The first corpse was Abel’s. Both allusions draw the parallel between Claudius’s and Cain’s sin, a parallel that in this case is persuasive. A final reference to Cain comes from Hamlet, as he watches the gravedigger dig up a skull that he compares to “Cain’s jaw-bone, that did the first murder” (5.1.77), reminding the audience that Hamlet is, among other things, a play about the consequences of fratricide.

Additional examples of non-contrastive biblical allusions occur in King Lear. On the level of allusion, Cordelia is several times linked to Christ. For instance, after she returns to England, late in the play, Cordelia says of her still-absent father Lear, “O dear father, / It is thy business I go about” (4.4.23–4). This is an allusion to Christ’s remark to his parents in the Temple, where they finally find him after becoming separated from him: “Knewe ye not that I must go about my father’s [i.e. God’s] business?” he asks (Luke 2:49). Two scenes later, an anonymous gentleman states of the mad Lear:

Thou hast one daughter

Who redeems nature from the general curse

Which twain have brought her to. (4.6.201–3)

The most obvious “twain” referred to here are Goneril and Regan, Cordelia’s wicked sisters who have “cursed” nature by their “unnatural” behavior (conspiring against father, sister, and husbands). But in biblical terms, a “general curse” was brought upon nature and all subsequent humanity by another twain, Adam and Eve. In Christian theology, this general curse was redeemed by the Redeemer, Christ; in the play Cordelia “redeems nature” in her own way. A final suggestion of Cordelia as a Christ-figure is visual rather than verbal. This mode of allusion is peculiar to drama, where aspects of staging may visually mirror the conventional iconography of biblical images. Lear’s final entrance, for example, with the dead Cordelia in his arms has been described as a gender-inverted Pietà (Goodland, 2007). Nothing specific in the text demands this, but the earlier allusions establish the parallel between Cordelia and Christ, so the scene could plausibly be staged to resemble the iconography of Mary cradling her dead son, familiar from religious art. Cordelia is not to be equated with Christ, nor is she divine herself, but the ultimate model for her innocent suffering and her self-sacrifice to save her father is Christ. The biblical allusions add depth and resonance for those who recognize them.

Some biblical stories were especially familiar, because they were fundamental to Christian theology and the history of God’s plan for human salvation. The Crucifixion, for instance, provides allusions for many Shakespeare plays, including King Lear, as well as Richard II and Julius Caesar. Another widely recognizable biblical story was that of the Fall, the first sin of Adam and Eve that resulted in their banishment from Eden and the corruption of the world. Eve is the first to succumb to the serpent’s temptation to disobey God, and she then passes the forbidden fruit to Adam. As noted earlier, Claudius is compared to Cain, but he is also described as a “serpent” by his dead brother’s ghost, and it is when old Hamlet was sleeping in his edenic orchard that this “serpent” killed him (1.5.39, 35–6). Young Hamlet’s focus, however, is more on the betrayal of his dead father by his mother. Even before he knows that Claudius has murdered old Hamlet, young Hamlet condemns what he feels is Gertrude’s sexual appetite, which has led her into Claudius’s bed before her first husband has been properly mourned. “Frailty thy name is woman!” Hamlet cries, evoking Eve, the first to be named “woman,” whose moral frailty (traditionally interpreted in sexual terms) corrupted her husband and the world. The world for Hamlet is a fallen Eden, “an unweeded garden” in which “things rank and gross in nature / Possess it merely” (1.2.135–7). Thus, after the Fall, even the garden of Paradise may have become corrupt, not to mention Denmark, a state in which, according to Marcellus, “something is rotten” (1.4.90).

While Genesis represents the beginning of the Christian narrative, and the Crucifixion its most theologically essential moment, the Book of Revelation describes its ending. Millenarianism – the expectation of the end of days – has a long history. Religious turmoil caused by the Protestant Reformation and subsequent Protestant–Catholic conflicts, such as the threat of the Spanish Armada and the Gunpowder Plot in England, rekindled millennial expectations in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This may partly explain the frequent allusions to the Apocalypse in Shakespeare’s plays. These allusions and references appear in early plays, as in 1 Henry VI, when Henry V’s war against the French is compared to “the dreadful Judgment Day” (1.1.29). But apocalyptic images from Revelation seem to have taken on a greater interest for Shakespeare later in his career, especially in the Romances. This is also true of Antony and Cleopatra, which, with its exotic Egyptian scenes, its flitting across the entire Mediterranean world, its unearthly music, and Cleopatra’s final apotheosis, is the most Romance-like of the tragedies.

In the first scene, Antony expresses a desire for a “new heaven” and a “new earth” that could contain the infinite overflow of his and Cleopatra’s mutual love (1.1.17). As the audience, though not Antony, will recognize, this alludes to John’s statement in Revelation that he “sawe a new heaven, & a new earth: for the first heaven, and the first earth were passed away” (Revelation 21:1). Later, when Antony describes his own downfall, he admits that this is a time

When my good stars that were my former guides

Have empty left their orbs and shot their fires

Into the abysm of hell. (3.13.145–7)

A similar image of stars falling into hell occurs in Revelation. John writes, “I sawe a starre fall from heaven unto the earth, and to him was given the keye of the bottomless pit. And he opened the bottomless pit, and there arose the smoke of the pit, as the smoke of the great furnace” (Revelation 9:1–2). The image of the fallen star returns later in the response of the guards to Antony’s botched suicide. “The star is fall’n,” says one, and the other responds, “And the time is at his period.” Both cry “Alas, and woe” (4.14.106–7). Shakespeare combines several passages from Revelation here:

& there fell a great starre from heaven burning like a torch. (8:10)

And he sware … that time shulde be no more. (10:6)

Wo, wo, wo to the inhabitants of the earth. (8:13)

Such allusions to the Apocalypse seem dark and cast a shadow on Antony’s character, since the falling star in Revelation is usually interpreted (in fulfillment of Isaiah 14:12) as a reference to Lucifer or Satan, the rebel angel and “bearer of light” cast out of heaven. Such a biblical parallel reflects (anachronistically) the Roman perspective on Antony, who, seduced by Egypt’s “serpent of old Nile,” rebelled against Rome, and whose final defeat marked the triumph of Caesar Augustus, who ushered in Rome’s golden age. Shakespeare’s play, however, offers more than one perspective on Antony. For instance, the allusions to Revelation continue after Antony’s death, and for Cleopatra, Antony is not a demon but a god:

His face was as the heav’ns, and therein stuck

A sun and moon, which kept their course and lighted

The little O, the earth.

…

His legs bestrid the ocean; his reared arm

As all the tuned spheres, and that to friends;

But when he meant to quail and shake the orb,

He was as rattling thunder. For his bounty,

There was no winter in’t; an autumn ’twas

That grew the more by reaping. (5.2.78–87)

This passage alludes not to Satan but to one of the Angels of the Apocalypse (Seaton, 1946):

And I sawe another mightie Angel come downe from heaven, clothed with a cloude, and the raine bowe upon his head, & his face was as the sunne, and his feete as pillers of fyre … and he put his right fote upon the sea, and his left on the earth, and cryed with a lowed voice, as when a lyon roareth: and when he had cryed, seven thondres uttered their voices. … And the Angel which I sawe stand upon the sea and upon the earth, lift up his hand to heaven, And sware … that time should be no more. (Revelation 10:1–6)

The image of reaping comes from a later verse, “Thrust in thy sickle and reap, for the time is come to reap, for the corn of the earth is ripe” (14:15). In terms of biblical allusions, then, for Caesar, Antony is a fallen angel, a devil to be cast out; for Cleopatra, he was an angel on earth, whose death has brought time (their time anyway) to its close, and who awaits her in heaven.

Finally, the emphatic repetition of promises and entreaties to “come” in the final scenes of Antony and Cleopatra echoes the final lines of Revelation that bring the whole Christian Bible to its end: “He which testifieth these things, saith, Surely, I come quickly. Amen, even so come, Lord Jesus” (Revelation 22:20). For example, Antony calls “Come Eros, Eros!” “Come, then!” and “Draw, and come” (4.14.54, 78, 84). Similarly, Diomedes is sent by Cleopatra who is worried that Antony may act rashly, but he is “come … too late” (4.14.126–7). Antony is taken to the monument, where Cleopatra calls “come, come Antony.” He replies, “O quick, or I am gone.” “O come, come, come,” she responds (4.15.29, 31, 37). The repetition of the word culminates in Cleopatra’s cry, “Husband, I come!” (5.2.287). Shakespeare’s use of the verb “come” includes all the ordinary senses that Revelation employs, as well as John’s apocalyptic urgency to “come quickly.” But Shakespeare may be adding a sexual dimension that would ordinarily be bawdy, but here seems strangely transcendent. Cleopatra’s only use of the word “husband” in the play expresses and enacts a consummation with her lover through death. Cleopatra’s cry implicitly combines two favorite English sexual puns on orgasm: Cleopatra “dies” and “comes” at once. The senses of both words entwine in a peculiarly Shakespearean version of the Liebestod. Its impact is heightened by the allusions to Revelation, which describes the end of time in terms of a marriage between Christ and his Church: John sees Jerusalem come down “from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband” (Revelation 21:2).

Since debates about religious ideas were fundamental to English Renaissance culture, Shakespeare not surprisingly demonstrates an interest in them. He explores the nature of grace (Measure for Measure, Pericles), providence (the English histories, King Lear), redemption (1 Henry IV, Measure for Measure), and resurrection (All’s Well that Ends Well, Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale). Biblical allusion is his principal technique for engaging his audience with such explorations. But ultimately Shakespeare was a playwright rather than a theologian, and he often co-opted religious ideas for ironic or theatrical purposes. In other words, Shakespeare’s biblical allusions do not seem to have been intended for doctrinal purposes. Instead, Shakespeare alluded to the Bible primarily because it was a vast storehouse of readily recognizable, powerful stories, characters, and language, the same reasons for which he alluded to Ovid and Virgil. Yet many more members of his audience knew the Bible than the Metamorphoses, as is likely still the case today. This made, and continues to make, biblical allusion a powerful tool for manipulating his audiences and for enhancing the emotional and intellectual resonances of his plays.

Notes

1 All Shakespeare citations are from The Riverside Shakespeare, second edition, ed. G. Blakemore Evans et al. (Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, 1997).

2 “The H. Scriptures II,” in The Works of George Herbert, ed. F. E. Hutchinson (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1941), p. 58.