INTRODUCTION

Abraham and the Shakespearean Stage

This study seeks to illuminate Shakespeare’s dramatic fascination with Abraham’s near sacrifice of his son Isaac in Genesis 22. Scenes of child killing or near child killing fill Shakespeare’s early plays, but, remarkably, no one has yet considered this in full. Genesis 22, I will show, informed Clifford’s attack on young Rutland in 3 Henry VI and Henry’s political sacrifice of his son Edward, which opens the play; Hubert’s providentially thwarted murder of Arthur in King John; Aaron the Moor’s surprising decision to spare his son amid the filial slaughters of Titus Andronicus; and old York’s darkly comic insistence that King Henry execute York’s (adult) son, Aumerle, in Richard II.1

The playwright’s full engagement with the biblical narrative, however, does not manifest itself exclusively in scenes involving the sacrifice of children or in verbal borrowings from the famously sparse narrative. This is not a traditional study of literary borrowing or influence that primarily seeks to link Genesis 22 and Shakespeare via philological evidence—although I certainly don’t ignore the connections that are there. I want to stress at the outset that the real influence of Genesis 22 and its interpretive tradition is seen in the critical, conceptual framework Shakespeare develops to think through, dramatically speaking, the relationships between religion, sovereignty, law, and justice. In short, Shakespeare uses Genesis 22 to understand the world—and to pray. Consequently, his Abrahamic explorations become strikingly apparent in unexpected places such as the trial of Shylock in The Merchant of Venice and the bifurcated structure of Timon of Athens.

Because of its centrality to the three great monotheisms—Judaism (Abram), Christianity (Abraham), and Islam (Ibrahim)—the outline of Genesis 22 is familiar to most people in Western and Near Eastern cultures.2 God unexpectedly calls Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac (although in Islam, Ishmael is generally understood to be the sacrificial son). Abraham responds immediately to the call saying “Here I am” and takes Isaac to Mount Moriah. Before he can use his drawn knife to slay Isaac, an angel stops him. A ram suddenly appears in a thicket, and Abraham sacrifices the animal instead.

Genesis 22 completes the extraordinary narrative of Abraham’s long life. In Genesis 12, God calls Abram to leave home without any sense of where he will go or if he will return. Famine forces him to Egypt, where, in an attempt to protect his beautiful wife Sarah, he tells Pharaoh that she is his sister. The ruse backfires, and Pharaoh seizes Sarah, only to release her because he realizes he has angered God by taking a married woman. Later, Abram rescues his kidnapped nephew Lot in a daring military adventure. Barren, Sarah convinces Abram to have a child with Hagar, her servant. Eventually, however, Sarah comes to resent Hagar’s son, Ishmael, and insists Abram banish him. In Genesis 17, God makes a new covenant with Abram, but one that requires he circumcise himself at age 90 and take a new name: Abraham. In Genesis 18, Abraham finds himself bargaining unsuccessfully with God to halt the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, a cataclysmic event that unravels the family of Lot. God fulfills his promise to Sarah in Genesis 21 wherein Isaac (whose name refers to Sarah’s “laughing” at the suggestion someone her age could have a child) is born.

One can understand Abraham’s failed negotiations with God in Genesis 18 to spare Sodom and Gomorrah if the patriarch could find but ten honest men as a precursor to his complete willingness to submit to God’s call in Genesis 22. As John Caputo points outs, Abraham has learned not to

enter into negotiations with God, as he had haggled over the price of Sodom and Gomorrah in Genesis 18. Instead of giving God trouble over what looks like an unreasonable demand, he just says me voici. God gives a return only in the instant when it is clear that Abraham gives a pure gift, when he has raised the dagger and has no intention of stopping, when he is without hope or expectation of a return, when he has already made the decision and now it is just a question of “executing” it in an un-calculating aneconomy.3

The call from God in Genesis 22 comes, then, when Abraham is very old, as is Sarah. Genesis 22 thus has come to be understood as Abraham’s last trial—last not only in terms of chronology but also in terms of comprehensiveness.4 As early as Genesis 12 God had told Abraham that he would father a great nation, which he confirmed in Genesis 19 by identifying Isaac as the seed of this nation. Isaac embodies everything that has been endured—and promised.

Abraham’s total willingness to submit to God under these circumstances makes Genesis 22—or the akedah, or “binding”—critical to the Jewish tradition. His willingness to sacrifice has come to stand in the post-Rabbinic world as a model of faith and obedience for all generations (Genesis Rabbah 55:1). Christianity typologically connects Abraham’s willingness to give himself over to Christ’s complete sacrifice or self-oblation (Hebrews 11:7). The absolute willingness to submit to God makes Ibrahim/Abraham the first hanif, or monotheist (Sura 3:67), in Islam.

And it is this willingness of Abraham to completely give himself up and over to God in extraordinary circumstances that ultimately fascinates Shakespeare. Not unlike the long interpretive tradition that precedes him—the early Jewish commentators, Philo, St. Paul, the Christian Church Fathers (Origen, Tertullian, Justin Martyr, Ambrose, etc.), the Koran, Medieval exegesis from all three Abrahamic faiths, Calvin, and Luther—Shakespeare comes to wrestle with the aneconomic paradox of Genesis 22: God tells Abraham to give everything, and he demands this impossibly difficult to imagine gift while insisting Abraham expect nothing in return—salvation, for example.

Somewhat surprisingly, though, Shakespeare’s dramatic engagement with Genesis 22 is made legible not by tracing the direct influence of this interpretive tradition, but by the so-called continental philosophers—Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Levinas, and, most recently, Derrida—who inform so much of our own literary critical activity, activity which still certainly leans toward the purely secular. For these thinkers Genesis 22 became a critical narrative and their Abrahamic explorations allow us to reconsider some of the most vexing cruxes in Shakespeare in a new light.

To a certain extent, then, this book reaches beyond Shakespeare studies in that I provide an introductory sketch of how the terrifying mystery of God’s command in Genesis 22 has been interpreted in history. In some sense the book is an attempt to situate Shakespeare in a complex genealogy that extends from ancient religion to postmodern philosophy. We are at a moment in time when the relationship between the religious and the secular is being reconfigured yet again. This book is, in part, an attempt to bring Shakespeare into the larger current conversation about religion in the modern world by exploring his engagement with one of religion’s oldest and most influential narratives.

For most readers, it is the philosophical work of Søren Kierkegaard in Fear and Trembling that most profoundly illuminates the paradox at the center of the interpretive tradition.5 For Kierkegaard, Abraham cannot even reward himself with the fleeting sense of hope for salvation following God’s command. In fact, what a modern individual would consider a normal sense of self must evaporate in Abraham’s willingness to give himself over. Abraham’s submission must be almost unimaginably complete, total, and instantaneous, the latter temporal factor linguistically marked by the Hebrew term hineni, or “Here I am.” A better translation for that term, Hilary Putnam suggests, might be the militaristic “Ready!” which implies an almost purely affective response to the call, a response without thought.6 Simply put, hineni performs the speech-act of making oneself completely available to “Other” to the extent that the responsiveness to or for the other could be said to constitute the “self.” Abraham says “Here I am” three times in Genesis 22: in his first response to God, then in his response to Isaac, who is about to ask where the sacrificial lamb is, and when he responds to the angel calling to stay his hand. The phrase makes up much of the dialogue in the brief narrative.

Of the many elements that make up the story, the hineni element demands special attention. “Here I am” echoes at critical Abrahamic moments in Richard II, Titus Andronicus, and Timon of Athens. But, again, it is the conceptual complexity of the term that matters most here. The utter absence of thought implied in hineni suggests a perfect religious emptying of selfhood (kenosis might be the best term to get at this) that makes possible a perfect, although paradoxical, relationship with the divine. The divide between the transcendent divine and the immanent being collapses entirely in Abraham’s “Here I am.” In the instant when he draws the dagger, Abraham must act religiously but without a divine presence or even any sense of divine presence. This creates a positively odd correspondence between the religious and what we would call the “secular,” a correspondence that emerges strikingly in Shakespeare’s own rigorous, albeit complexly mediated, explorations of Genesis 22.

In short, the strange religion of Shakespearean drama (if not of the playwright himself)—the religion Harold Bloom has identified as “secular transcendence”7—is constituted primarily by an Abrahamic desire to give oneself to the other that cannot be known, a desire that, Jacques Derrida argues, may determine institutionalized monotheisms but is not equivalent to them.8 According to Derrida, in “the impossible” instant when Abraham “gives” death (or almost gives death) without expecting anything in return (following Kierkegaard), one can glimpse the desire for something absolutely other that founds all religion. The Abrahamic gift identifies that which is not an exchange, that which stands outside even a sacrificial economy—that which can’t be thought.

One might frame the argument this way: In a Christian culture that restricted religious representations on the stage (in contrast to the Medieval mystery plays that could and did dramatize directly the Abraham and Isaac episode), Shakespeare sought dramatically, but still religiously, what Derrida identified philosophically, the impossible other, the Abrahamic gift. Correspondingly, the continued inability of literary-historical scholarship to locate Shakespearean drama precisely on the Christian spectrum stems not from a secular tendency in the playwright, but from a religious one, one that pushes back to the ancient mystery of Genesis 22. Shakespeare’s seemingly prescient distance from religion is actually a thorough or hyperbolic immersion that takes readers and audiences back to the ancient narrative of Abraham and Isaac.

It is, to specify my earlier claim about continental philosophy, primarily Derrida’s reading of the impossible gift that makes visible the continuity between our current “secular” world, Shakespeare’s post-Reformation world, and the ancient religious world of Genesis 22. Shakespeare’s world lacked the theoretical language we have to discuss otherness, of course. But the Reformation prompted an intensified need to define its religious truth against others, and we discover there a multitude of what Gil Anidjar calls “Abrahamic elaborations” to separate Christian from Jew and Muslim, leading to a rather intricate explanatory system of the otherness of the Abrahamic gift.9 These elaborations, ranging across the East/West divide, are visible as early as Titus Andronicus. Martin Luther simultaneously explains and participates in the phenomenon:

The Saracens have invented horrible lies on the basis of this text [Genesis 22]. They tell the fictitious story that Ishmael was immolated in the place of Isaac, who, they say, ran away and did not obey his father. Hence they boast that they are the sons of Sarah; for, as they say, Isaac was not sacrificed, but Ishmael was sacrificed in his brother’s place. It is the perpetual custom of all heretics to transfer to themselves the glory of the church and the people of God, for everybody wants to be nearest to God. And this temptation has existed among men from the beginning of the world. Thus today the heretics and the pope want to be the people of God. The Turk wants to be the people of God.10

Within the strict confines of the Christian world, too, Protestantism’s effort to distinguish itself from Catholicism led to an intensified critique of the exchange principles that seemed to inform the Augustinian concept of caritas (charity/perfect love). The Protestant was told repeatedly to seek to give perfectly—that is, without any expectation of Catholic reward for merit. As historian Natalie Zemon Davis writes, “In a profound sense, the religious reformations of the sixteenth century were a quarrel about gifts, that is, about whether humans can reciprocate to God, about whether humans can put God under obligation, and about what this means for what people should give to each other.”11 Shakespeare’s world was busy exploring the impossibility of the Abrahamic gift every bit as much as Derrida.

No image (or set of images) illustrates this deep engagement with Abraham more strikingly than Henry VIII’s ten stunning tapestries depicting the major events of the patriarch’s life that hung at Hampton Court Palace from roughly 1540 to the early seventeenth century. As Thomas P. Campbell writes, “visitors to Hampton Court regularly noted [their] beauty and magnificence above all others. In 1599, the Swiss diarist, Thomas Platter, commented that it was thought to be the finest and most artistic in England.”12 The set was enormously expensive, and it was often transported to London for state events, possibly Queen Elizabeth I’s coronation. Crossing into Hampton Court, a visitor would have been surrounded by over 81 meters of Abraham tapestries, some 5 meters high, mostly made of silk and gilt thread. The seventh scene tries to capture almost all of Genesis 22 from the moment Abraham and Isaac leave the servants at the bottom of Mount Moriah to the (Christian typological moment) when the two kneel together on a mountain ledge, presumably thanking God for his strange mercy.

As Campbell writes, “the richness and the scale of the tapestries leave little doubt that [they were] intended to celebrate and promote the parallels between Abraham and Henry [who was also, of course, the patriarch of a new church], and the continuation of the virtues that they embodied through Prince Edward.”13 Campbell is correct, I think, to assume the massive investment in the tapestries at or around 1540 had much to do with the birth of Edward in 1537, the long-awaited male heir that came to Henry, like Abraham, late in life.

Given the power of this iconography, then, it is perhaps no surprise that Shakespeare’s first consideration of Genesis 22 addresses another Henry and Edward in English royal history. Shakespeare opens 3 Henry VI with that notoriously “weak” and pious Henry politically sacrificing his son Edward’s right to rule. The political sacrifice of Edward that opens the play is, in turn, though, artfully juxtaposed to the physical sacrifice, or murder, of young Rutland by Clifford, perhaps the most grisly of all the child killings in Shakespeare (and drawn from a textual source, the chronicler Edward Hall). The actual Rutland slaying—standing in stark and bloody contrast to King Henry’s opening gesture—ameliorates and complicates Henry’s sacrifice of his son, reminding an audience of the Genesis patriarch whose commitment to a divine “Other” compromised his responsibilities to this world. Through Genesis 22, Shakespeare, not unlike Henry VIII gazing at tapestries, contemplates sovereignty itself: its relationship to the divine, the paradoxical power of a “weak” sovereign who does not rely on pure violence but instead relates to God via sacrifice, and the always pressing political problem of achieving sovereign legitimacy and passing that legitimacy down to one’s son.

Shakespeare’s King John, I argue, very much illuminates the Abrahamic at work in 3 Henry VI. There the playwright turns immediately and more directly to the problem of sovereign legitimacy; in the play’s opening lines the French ambassador tells the English King his “majesty” is “borrowed” (1.1.5). This play relentlessly explores the possibility that sovereignty involves only pure force and has no divine inspiration. Young Arthur’s claim to the throne is as legitimate, if not more legitimate, than John’s, and the playwright never backs away from that reality. When John sends Hubert to take Arthur’s life Shakespeare comes as close as he ever does to suggesting sovereignty derives simply from the greatest violence. But Shakespeare artfully and tellingly hesitates on this critical issue of political philosophy and religion. Hubert fails to complete his rather straightforward task. Arthur dies, yes, but only in a manner—an accidental fall off a high cliff—that complicates rather than secures John’s claim to the throne. Moreover, without any apparent reason, and in striking contrast to his literary source (the anonymous play The Troublesome Raigne of John, King of England), Shakespeare depicts the scene involving Hubert and Arthur as oddly sacrificial, involving a father figure and a son, and borrowing language straight from the Abraham and Isaac cycle plays. Simply put, Shakespeare uses Genesis 22 to think.

In Richard II Shakespeare uses Genesis 22 to think through problems of divinely sanctioned absolutism. Briefly, Richard’s historical deposition threatened the legitimacy of rule by divine right. As Shakespeare’s Richard points out, a king on the throne by God’s will should have nothing to fear. But fear he must. This begs the troubling question for Tudor reign, a reign dependent on the usurper in historiography: if a king on the throne can be deposed by sheer force, does one have to abandon the notion of rule by divine right? Shakespeare negotiates this historical tension by turning to Genesis 22. He dramatically frames the situation so that the problem is not that the king does not have divine access to the throne but that this particular king overestimates that access. Shakespeare suggests that Richard confuses his proximity to the divine with the divine itself. A true sovereign should respond like Abraham to the call from the divine, without assuming any deal or exchange for what is asked—in this case, royal invulnerability. Shakespeare thus reimagines rule by divine right in Abrahamic terms, first, in the figure of John of Gaunt, who seems willing to sacrifice his son Bolingbroke in the opening moments of the play in obedience to a divinely sanctioned monarch, and then in Gaunt’s aging and trembling brother, York, who, similarly, would sacrifice his son, Aumerle. Both Abrahamic figures facilitate the transfer of the crown from Richard to Henry. In the play’s seemingly comic 5.2, a scene borrowed almost straight from the Northhampton (formerly Dublin) Abraham and Isaac, Shakespeare suggests Abraham and Isaac is the one cycle play every sovereign should watch.

The second half of the book turns to three plays—Titus Andronicus, The Merchant of Venice, and Timon of Athens—that involve stranger and more passionately religious explorations of how one simultaneously responds to both God (Other) and one’s own (other). These plays have repeatedly made literary criticism twist and turn in what are, I will argue, Abrahamic paradoxes. Rather surprisingly, one discovers that the interpretive tradition of Genesis 22 has been influencing Shakespearean literary criticism for some time, although in unexpected and mostly unrecognized ways.

For example, critics long have been stymied by the wild sacrificial energy of Titus Andronicus, a play in which the title character gives death to so many of his own children. Twenty-one die in combat under his direction, two are executed because of their father’s political conflicts, and two more die at the hands of Titus himself. Amid this violence the play also features an unexpected scene wherein the play’s chief villain, Aaron the Moor, seemingly shows a spark of compassion by refusing to sacrifice his own son—even though that son’s existence threatens his rise from prisoner of the Romans to intimate partner of Tamora, now Empress of Rome. Once one entertains the possibility that Shakespeare works within an Abrahamic context, however, the play’s strange and rather shocking familial violence begins to make a bit more sense, including the strange Abrahamic conflation of Aaron (Jewish priest) the (Islamic) Moor and his surprising preference for his own newborn over the whole of Rome.

Unlike most contemporary critics, I contend that Aaron’s otherwise perfect villainy is not movingly mitigated by his unwillingness to sacrifice his son but is confirmed by it. Genesis 22 may be the only widely known narrative wherein not killing or not being willing to kill your own child could be considered wrong, the act of a villain; and it is telling, then, that Shakespeare deploys it in a key moment defining the difference between Aaron and Titus. In other words, Aaron the Moor’s refusal to sacrifice his own son marks an Abrahamic distinction between West and East at a time when the Islamic Ottoman empire’s growth was prompting a host of Abrahamic elaborations. An audience may be horrified by the sacrificial impulses of the pre-Christian Roman, Titus, but in comparison to the pre-Muslim Aaron the Moor’s refusal to sacrifice, Titus seems to be more sinned against than sinning.

Contemporary criticism’s tendency to sympathize with Aaron’s (non) gesture, I argue further, has been in part shaped not just by inattention to the Genesis 22 interpretive tradition but, somewhat ironically, by an unrecognized embrace of one specific and relatively recent turn in the long-standing efforts to understand the story. Modern audiences tend to sympathize with Aaron as other more than we sympathize with Titus and his commitment to an abstract Other (the state of Rome), not just because we have effaced Genesis 22, but because that effacement in part has led us to embrace one powerful interpretation of the narrative provided by the French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas.

Discussions of alterity, or otherness, in early modern studies still limit themselves mainly to historical examinations of how one culture “othered” another culture or how one part of a culture “othered” another part of the same culture for purposes of self-fashioning or political dominance. When we talk about a response to the “other” we are almost always talking about the other individual, usually a marginalized individual; we rarely talk about the response to the Other (God, for example) that organizes Genesis 22. To stay with the current example, then, in readings of Titus Andronicus, we tend to organize our thoughts around the Moorish otherness of Aaron much more quickly than we do around the Roman general’s commitment to the abstract Otherness of Rome.

Our rather specific critical emphasis in terms of otherness derives largely from the ethical direction provided by Levinas in responding to Edmond Husserl’s phenomenology.14 In seeking to establish the subject as the generator of meaning for the world outside itself, Husserl gave the intentional acts of individual consciousness primacy that had heretofore been lacking. From this perspective, acts of individual consciousness determined the meaning of the “objective” world. But this understanding of the individual consciousness cannot fully account for the existence of the other individual consciousness outside itself also making meaning. That is, if my consciousness determines meaning in the world, how do I make sense of yours? I can make sense of you, but I cannot simultaneously make sense of your consciousness making sense of me. The alterity of the other is obliterated by my attempt to make sense of it. (In the same way, any attempt to “give” is immediately negated by some economical movement, say, for example, psychological payback.)

For Husserl, this was an epistemological problem: How can one understand or know the other ego?15 With his Théorie de l’intuition dans la phénoménologie de Husserl (1930), however, Emmanuel Levinas gave this epistemological problem of otherness an ethical inflection it retains to the present day.16 The other Ego that cannot be known is not only a gap in my understanding, but the other as other ego (autrui) exerts an ethical call on me that must be addressed.

In one sense, this ethical turn solves the previously irresolvable problem of self-other relations. Because the ethical encounter with the other precedes even subjectivity, the problem of the self-obliterating alterity of the other dissolves once we understand that the self is itself determined by the very encounter with alterity.17 For Levinas, the encounter with the other brings the subject into being. And, if the “other” comes first, even before the self, there is no threat of the self doing violence to the other.

Derrida countered, however, that this Levinasian “pure thought of pure difference” cannot be sustained. It is a “dream” that “must vanish at daybreak.”18 The aporia at hand here—the idea that the self/same always objectifies or excludes the other in some way—is more resilient than Levinas assumed. Because the other is there from the very beginning, its alterity is always already compromised rather than prior, original, or accessible in the way Levinas suggests. Derrida explains “that alterity had to circulate at the origin of meaning, in welcoming alterity in general into the heart of the logos, the Greek thought of Being forever has protected itself against every absolutely surprising convocation.”19 An absolute respect for alterity remains impossible without compromising the otherness of alterity and reproducing the self/same of Western metaphysics.

How does this relate to Genesis 22? According to Derrida, Levinas not only underestimates the elusiveness of alterity, but also the degree of respect for alterity already present in earlier thinkers. Kierkegaard, for example, “had a sense of the relationship to the irreducibility of the totally-other, not in the egoistic and esthetic here and now, but in the religious beyond of the concept, in the direction of a certain Abraham.”20 Abraham, we see, was at the center of Derrida’s thought thirty years before the so-called turn to religion in The Gift of Death. Derrida points specifically to Kierkegaard and Abraham because Levinas habitually differentiates himself from Kierkegaard by, as Hent de Vries points out, insisting on the “trans-descendence” of alterity.21 The “other” for Levinas always involves the other individual in a “face-to-face” encounter. This does not negate the infinitely Other, the absolutely Other, the religious Other—“God, for example”—but for Levinas that absolutely Other always leaves its trace in the “other” as other individual.22

But, again, Derrida’s critique of Levinas reveals that this distinction between the “other” and the “absolutely Other,” the distinction between Levinas and Kierkegaard, cannot hold. And it cannot hold because Levinas cannot address the paradoxes of Genesis 22 any more completely than previous thinkers. To see the distinction dissolve, we can turn to Levinas’s own “Abrahamic elaboration,” his most specific attempt to distinguish himself from Kierkegaard’s reading of Abraham after digesting Derrida’s critique. For Levinas, the important element of the story of the sacrifice of Isaac is not Abraham’s response to the “absolutely Other”—the initial call to sacrifice—but the call to the “other” individual—the second call to preserve Isaac’s life.23 Levinas thus seeks to maintain a distance between himself and Kierkegaard by locating alterity in the ethical response to the other individual.

But he cannot quite differentiate from whence the two calls to respond originate. As de Vries asks, “Are the two voices that Levinas sets apart in his reading of Genesis 22 not in fact different intonations or modulations of one and the same voice, that of the one Other, the Other as One? Does God speak in different tongues here?” Levinas’s attention to alterity never escapes the metaphysics of the One, the same, the self. Try as he might, Levinas cannot distinguish his understanding of alterity from the Kierkegaardian religious understanding of alterity. Derrida’s reading of the impossible instant, the gift, the moment of madness when Abraham stands ready to kill Isaac but doesn’t kill him, can also be described, then, as an attempt to mediate or lessen the distinction between Kierkegaard and Levinas.

In fact, as we shall see in the final chapter on Timon of Athens in some detail, Derrida coined a specific phrase—tout autre est tout autre (“every other [one] as every [bit] other”)—to negotiate the difference between Autre (Other) and autrui (other), Kierkegaard and Levinas:

God, as the wholly other, is to be found everywhere there is something of the wholly other. And since each of us, everyone else, each other is infinitely other in its absolute singularity, inaccessible, solitary, transcendent, nonmanifest, originarily nonpresent to my ego (as Husserl would say of the alter ego that can never be originarily present to my consciousness and that I can apprehend only through what he calls appresentation and analogy), then what can be said about Abraham’s relation to God can be said about my relation without relation to every other (one) as every (bit) other . . . , in particular my relation to my neighbor or my loved ones who are as inaccessible to me, as secret and transcendent as Jahweh.24

Simply put, the relationship between our current critical interest in the “other” and Shakespeare’s early modern religious interest in the “Other,” then, might be closer than we think.

To get at this from yet another angle, Levinas derives his understanding of alterity from Descartes’s Catholic, Christian notion of the infinite. Descartes, Levinas writes in Totality and Infinity, discovered “a relation with a total alterity irreducible to interiority, which nevertheless does not do violence to interiority—a receptivity without passivity, a relation between freedoms.”25 Descartes’s idea of the infinite, then, provides a model for Levinas’s absolutely “other” outside the thought of the subject. Levinas’s idea of “the ethical relation to the other has a formal resemblance to the relation, in Descartes’s Third Meditation, between the res cogitans and infinity of God. What interests Levinas in this moment of Descartes’s argument is that the human subject has an idea of infinity, and this idea, by definition, is a thought that contains more than can be thought.” The more secular advocates of Levinas have longed feared that his work will be tainted with “religiosity” and stress that this is merely a “formal relation,” that Levinas “transforms” Descartes’s understanding of the infinite as God, that is “substitutes” the other for God.26 But Derrida’s troubling and intriguing questions about the nature of this transformation and substitution insist that literary scholars reconsider our own Levinasian-derived critical tendencies.

In short, because of our unrecognized critical investment in a Levinasian reading of Genesis 22, we rarely consider that our critical, seemingly secular and ethical interest in the “other”—as in the marginalized figure like the “moor”—is inextricably tied to a religious understanding of the “Other” beyond being. But that link is quite profound, and presses on our response to Shakespeare’s work. To understand a play like Titus Andronicus, then, we must concentrate on the contrast Shakespeare stages between Titus’s willingness to sacrifice his children for an “Other” (again, the idea of Rome) and the unwillingness of Aaron to do so because of his perceived obligation to the “other” (his infant son). “Here Aaron is,” the Moor responds when called by the Nurse to kill his son. This Abrahamic figure, however, refuses and, instead, kills the nurse, who squeals like a sacrificial animal (4.2.147). It is the Abrahamic situation—not an Abrahamic resolution—that links the ancient world, Shakespeare, and us, and Shakespeare traces that situation, albeit dramatically, with all the explanatory power of Derrida.

Toward the end of the book, I try to test this hypothesis most pointedly on the play that seems the most at odds with both any pre-Christian religious Abram/Abraham and our current secular ethics: The Merchant of Venice. The play engages the most violent forms of Christian typology, rereading Judaism and certain figures in particular, like Abraham, from the Hebrew Bible simply as prefiguring Christian salvation. Correspondingly, the play’s treatment of Shylock the Jew and, in particular, the forced conversion to Christianity he experiences, directly contradicts the prime directive of our contemporary ethics: you must respect the difference of the “other.” Derrida’s work and a broader understanding of the interpretive tradition of Genesis 22 allow us to see, however, that the play’s profound religious desire for the Abrahamic gift briefly but significantly interrupts and interferes with its own, often violent and hypocritical early modern Christian allegorizing. The play simultaneously turns us back to the ancient mystery of Abraham and Isaac, and points forward to a postmodern desire for alterity, a postmodern respect for the individual subject that is not subsumed entirely by dominant political and cultural forces. The test of the hypothesis is especially illuminating because this rather Derridean hypothesis requires me to challenge Derrida himself. My reading here challenges Derrida’s brief reading of The Merchant of Venice in “What Is a ‘Relevant’ Tradition?” where he seems to have missed his own Abrahamic point.27

In thinking through Genesis 22 Shakespeare is simply not willing to dispense with a general obligation toward others to fulfill the obligation toward God, the tout autre. Instead, like Derrida operating in the contemporary world, he often seeks to weaken, or at least complicate, the distinction between the two in a way that is consistent with the most interesting interpreters of Genesis 22. To put this another way, in the impossible contradictory instant of the Abrahamic gift (of death) Derrida seeks to find a relationship between religious obligation and everyday ethical obligation, to find an instant where tout autre est tout autre. So does Shakespeare, and this is nowhere more striking than in the relatively late and famously schematic play Timon of Athens.

No other Shakespearean character seeks to give as completely, as absolutely, as Timon. That trait forces an audience to consider where the desire to give comes from and suggests, à la Levinas, that the desire to give might precede everything else. As G. W. Knight argued years ago, Timon’s excessive giving and his misanthropy reveal a “primary energy” directing him away from the partial and finite world. For Knight, Timon is something of a Nietzschean superman pushing past Christian thought. I argue in my concluding chapter, however, that Timon of Athens is a religious play in that it pushes not past Christianity to a Nietzschean sensibility but down through Christianity to the religious passion underlying Christianity: the Abrahamic desire to give absolutely, completely. Indeed, the religious movement is so profound that the play struggles, even wavers, in what must have been its own inauguratory Christian beliefs. In fact, this struggle allows room for Knight’s Nietzschean reading and, I would speculate, participates in the notorious noncompletion and nonproduction of the play. Still, even here we find a profound moment where Shakespeare ties Timon’s desire to give absolutely and completely to his response not just to the “Other” but to the “other,” his loyal steward.

Before turning to Shakespeare directly I open with a consideration of what must have been an immediate dramatic influence: the medieval cycle plays showing Abraham and Isaac. In particular, I turn my attention to the Towneley, or Wakefield, play, a play, like much of Shakespeare’s work, that confounds our distinctions between secular and religious, immanent and transcendent, premodern and modern, primarily because, unlike seven or eight other extant versions, this Abraham never tells Isaac why he is sacrificing him, and in that approximates the mystery of the original narrative. In the course of discussing that highly distinctive text I try to provide an even more extended introduction to Abraham and the Abrahamic so that when turning to Shakespeare’s plays we can concentrate, as so many frequently urge, on the plays “themselves” rather than the critical, historical apparatus I construct. The point, again, is not necessarily to a show a traditional literary borrowing but to illuminate how dramatic texts are capable of internalizing and participating in the interpretive tradition of Genesis 22.

I intend to show, too, that my theoretical engagements here enhance and illuminate, rather than contradict, ongoing historical scholarship on Shakespeare’s religion. I do not follow a particular critical methodology here. But I do strive in each consideration of Shakespeare’s plays to work within the critical tradition, broadly understood, situating my arguments alongside well-known critical cruxes. Like every academic writer, I seek innovation and originality; but I also consciously seek to provide and discover mutually corroborating evidence for my claims and hope that my theoretical claims can provide some corroborating evidence for Shakespeare scholars who do not share my particular enthusiasm for the explanatory power of continental philosophy.

So while my theoretically oriented arguments may seem strange to some at first glance, I would note that they are often quite consistent with what has been argued about the plays in the last two hundred years or so. In this I am attempting in part to address what is an unnecessary divide in Shakespeare studies between theory and historicism. The “turn to religion or ethics” in current critical theory, a turn explicated most forcefully by Jacques Derrida, provides the means not just to understand our difficulty with Shakespeare’s religion, but to understand Shakespeare’s engagement with the Abrahamic in his own time.

That Shakespeare’s plays have risen, in the words of Harold Bloom, to the status of a “secular Bible” has had much to do with his seeming ability to appropriate his culture’s religious energy while maintaining a critical distance from it. For example, while his plays seem to studiously avoid any representation of a divine presence (the appearance of Jupiter in Cymbeline and the vision of Katherine in All Is True being complicated counterexamples), he certainly promulgates an openness to a radical otherness—an openness that tantalizingly eludes specific doctrinal designations and seems stunningly prescient in its engagement with modern secular or ethical thought. But given Shakespeare’s extraordinary and yet-to-be-fully-discussed engagement with Genesis 22 it would be a mistake to take twentieth-century understandings of Shakespeare’s so-called secularism too far into the twenty-first. Looking from the twenty-first-century back to Shakespeare and, then, back to Genesis 22, secularism looks a bit more religious than we tend to presume.

In referring from time to time to the Abrahamic to describe Shakespeare’s dramatic explorations that seem to exceed the Christian tradition, I am in no way trying to invent a neutral Abraham to whom all world communities must hold themselves accountable, but only to present a more accurate account of what must be called the “religion” of Shakespeare’s plays.28