1. Unless otherwise indicated, all quotations from Shakespeare come from David Bevington’s The Complete Works of Shakespeare, 4th ed. (New York: Harper Collins, 1992). Biblical translations are from the King James Version, unless the Geneva Bible (1560) is cited.
2. A number of very useful and broad discussions of Genesis 22, Abraham, and the interpretive tradition were generated, in part, by the anticipation of the new millennium and then the reverberations of the 9/11 attacks. See, especially, Carol Delaney, Abraham on Trial: The Social Legacy of Biblical Myth (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998); Bruce Chilton, Abraham’s Curse: The Roots of Violence in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (New York: Doubleday, 2008); Bruce Feiler, Abraham: A Journey to the Heart of Three Faiths (New York: Morrow, 2002). For perhaps the most influential scholarly consideration of Abraham, see Geza Vermes, Scripture and Tradition in Judaism (Leiden: Brill, 1961). See, too, Jon Levenson, The Death and Resurrection of the Beloved Son: The Transformation of Child Sacrifice in Judaism and Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), and his Inheriting Abraham: The Legacy of the Patriarch in Judaism, Christianity and Islam (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012).
3. John D. Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 213.
4. Shalom Spiegel, The Last Trial: On the Legends and Lore of the Command to Offer Isaac as a Sacrifice, trans. Judah Goldin (Woodstock, Vt.: Jewish Lights, 150). Spiegel’s treatment of Genesis 22 is one of the most compelling studies of the modern era.
5. Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling; Repetition, Kierkegaard’s Writings, vol. 6, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983).
6. Hilary Putnam, “Levinas and Judaism,” in The Cambridge Companion to Levinas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 38.
7. Harold Bloom, “The Knight in the Mirror,” The Guardian, Friday 12 (Dec. 2003).
8. The critical Derridean text for this book is The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). Abraham and Genesis 22, however, have been at the center of Derrida’s thought since the 1960s. See, in particular, “Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas,” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 111.
9. See Gil Anidjar’s provocative introduction to Acts of Religion: Jacques Derrida (New York: Routledge, 2002).
10. Martin Luther, Lectures on Genesis Chapters 21–25, Luther’s Works, vol. 4, ed. Jaroslav Pelikan (St. Louis: Concordia, 1964), 108. John Tolan argues that the term “Saracens” evolved from the phrase “sons of Sara”, Saracens: Islam in the Medieval European Imagination (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 126–28.
11. Natalie Zemon Davis, The Gift in Sixteenth-Century France (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000), 100.
12. Thomas P. Campbell, “The Story of Abraham Tapestries at Hampton Court Palace,” in Flemish Tapestry in Europe and American Collections: Studies in Honour of Guy Delmarcel, ed. Koenrad Brosens (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2003): 59–85.
13. Ibid., 78.
14. Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. Peter Hallward (New York: Verso, 2001), 20.
15. Husserl’s solution to the problem relied on analogy. The “other” is another me, another self, an alter ego. As Levinas points out, however, this analogy, even at its most empathetic, leaves no room for the “other” as other. To borrow the phrasing of Colin Davis Jr., there is not enough “alter” in the concept of the alter ego” (Levinas: An Introduction [Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1996], 26).
16. The crucial Levinasian texts are Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), and Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1974).
17. C. Davis, Levinas: An Introduction, 48.
18. Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 151.
19. Ibid., 153.
20. Ibid., 111.
21. Hent de Vries, Religion and Violence: Philosophical Perspectives from Kant to Derrida (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 117.
22. Derrida makes clear that the possibility of God as absolutely other cannot be foreclosed or embraced. See Derrida’s The Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins (New York: Verso, 1997): “The event of revelation would reveal not only this or that—God, for example—but revealability itself. By the same token, this would forbid us saying ‘God, for example. . . . Must one choose between these two orders? . . . Must one choose between the priority of revelation (Offenbarung) and that of revealability (Offenbarkeit), the priority of manifestation and that of manifestability, of theology and theiology, of the science of God and the science of the divine, of the divinity of God?” (18–19).
23. Emmanuel Levinas, Proper Names, trans. Michael B. Smith (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 77.
24. Derrida, The Gift of Death, 78.
25. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 211.
26. Simon Critchley, “Introduction,” in The Cambridge Companion of Levinas, 14.
27. Jacques Derrida, “What Is a ‘Relevant’ Translation?” Critical Inquiry 27.2 (Winter 2001): 174–200.
28. For appropriate cautions on the term and the concept of “the Abrahamic” see Levenson’s Inheriting Abraham, 214.
1. The modern critical discussion of the play actually seems to have begun a bit earlier with Rosemary Woolf’s “The Effect of Typology on the English Medieaval Plays of Abraham and Isaac,” Speculum 32.4 (1957): 805–825. Woolf’s contention (discussed below) that the Towneley play “is in every way inferior to the others” (816) because of its failure to follow a typological pattern frames much of the subsequent criticism. She repeats the argument in her influential book The English Mystery Plays (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). Her negative aesthetic impression, however, follows even earlier scholarship by A. W. Pollard, The Towneley Plays, ed. George England, EETS, e.s. 71 (London, 1897), 13, and Hardin Craig, English Religious Drama of the Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1955), 306–9. For responses to her strong critical stance, see, in particular, Arnold Williams, “Typology and the Cycle Plays: Some Criteria,” Speculum 43.4 (1968): 677–684; John Gardner, “Idea and Emotion in the Towneley Abraham,” Papers in Language and Literature 7 (Summer 1971): 227–41; Robert B. Bennett, “Homiletic Design in the Towneley ‘Abraham,’” Modern Language Studies 7.1 (1977): 5–15, Thomas Rendall, “Visual Typology in the Abraham and Isaac Plays,” Modern Philology 81.3 (1984): 221–32; Edgar Schell, “The Distinctions of the Towneley Abraham,” Modern Language Quarterly 41.4 (1980): 315–27; Donna Smith Vinter, “Didactic Characterization: The Towneley Abraham,” Comparative Drama 14 (1980): 117–36. For more recent discussions of the Abraham plays see Clifford Davidson, “The Sacrifice of Isaac in Medieval English Drama,” Papers on Language & Literature 35.1 (1999): 1–17, and Allen J. Frantzen, “Tears for Abraham: The Chester Play of Abraham and Isaac and Antisacrifice in Works by Wilfred Owen, Benjamin Britten, and Derek Jarman,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 31.3 (2001): 445–76.
2. A tragedie of Abraham’s sacrifice written in French by Theodore Beza, and translated into English by Arthur Golding, ed. Malcolm Wallace (Toronto: University of Toronto Library, 1906); Feo Belcari, Saccre rappresentazioni e laude, ed. Onorato Alloco-Castellino (Torino: Unione Tipografico-editrice, 1920). See also Michael O’Connell’s discussion of Belcari in The Idolatrous Eye: Iconoclasm and Theater in Early-Modern England (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 74–76; Three Cretan Plays, ed. and trans. F. H. Marshall (London: Oxford University Press, 1929): 61–99; and John Mavrogordato, “The Greek Drama in Crete in the Seventeenth Century,” Journal of Hellenic Studies 48.1 (1928): 75–96.
3. V. A. Kolve, The Play Called Corpus Christi (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1966), 257, and Woolf, The English Mystery Plays, 149. For convenience, I have cited from the collection of Abraham translations printed in R. T. Davies, The Corpus Christi Play of the English Middle Ages (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1972). Important textual differences are treated in notes.
4. Davies, The Corpus Christi Play of the Middle Ages, 435.
5. See J. Burke Severs, “The Relationship Between the Brome and Chester Plays of Abraham and Isaac,” Modern Philology 42.3 (February 1945): 137–51.
6. Kolve, The Play Called Corpus Christi, 257.
7. Martin Stevens, Four Middle English Mystery Cycles: Textual, Contextual, and Critical Interpretations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 128.
8. The manuscript is located at the Huntington Library (Calif.), HM MS 1. See The Towneley Cycle: A Facsimile of Huntington MS HM 1, ed. A. C. Cawley and Martin Stevens (Leeds: University of Leeds, 1976). Editors have tended to supplement the Towneley with language from other Abraham plays. See, for example, The Wakefield Mystery Plays, ed. Martial Rose (New York: Norton, 1961), which uses language from the Brome play to conclude. Martin Stevens, “The Missing Parts of the Towneley Cycle,” Speculum 45.2 (1970): 254–65, reasserts the long-standing assumption that the missing sections are the result of “accidental loss.” What is lost are “two middle leaves in a quire,” specifically “Quire d, between f. 15” of the Abraham play and “f. 16, the middle of the fragmentary Isaac play. . . . The two missing leaves, therefore, contained the end of the Abraham play and the beginning of the Isaac play” (254).
9. Vinter, “Didactic Characterization,” 134.
10. The Towneley Cycle: A Facsimile of Huntington MS HM 1.
11. John D. Caputo, The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006).
12. See, for example, Bennett, “Homiletic Design in the Towneley ‘Abraham,’” 12.
13. Lawrence M. Clopper, Drama, Play and Game: English Festive Culture in the Medieval and Early Modern Period (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 20.
14. Sarah Beckwith, Signifying God: Social Relation and Symbolic Act in the York Corpus Christi Plays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).
15. See, in particular, Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Disciplines and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993) and Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003). See also Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions: Or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), and Gil Anidjar, “Secularism,” Critical Inquiry 33 (Autumn 2006): 52–77. For a disciplinary perspective closer to home, see C. John Sommerville’s The Secularization of Early Modern England: From Religious Culture to Religious Faith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), which makes clear the ways in which “secularization” as generally understood was a distinctly (Protestant) religious phenomenon.
16. In “Binding-Unbinding: Divided Responses of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam to the ‘Sacrifice’ of Abraham’s Beloved Son” (Journal of American Academy of Religion 72.4 [December 2004]: 824), an extraordinary article that notes 9/11 hijacker Muhammad Atta’s use of Ibrahimic rhetoric in his will, Yvonne Sherwood, a professor of religious studies and theology, suggests the need for
a new kind of analysis from those who, as I do, study Judaism, Christianity, or Islam primarily through their texts. [The 9/11 event and its Abrahamic citations] signals a need to sacrifice traditional disciplinary focus (around one particular author or time frame) for a larger macro-interpretation across the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic, and also a need to move away from a certain reification of the word alone and its particular Protestant and Lutheran heritage. Indeed, there could be no starker illustration of the need to study sacred texts within a wider web of structures, institutions, and performances than Muhammed Atta’s instructions that the Qur’an be spoken into cupped hands, then rubbed into the bag, tools, knife and bodies of the perpetrators. These abhorrent declensions of the Abrahamic grammars point to a need for textual scholars to push beyond the quest for ever more precise presentations of the text’s philology, sources, historical context, and literary qualities, toward questions of responsibility, critique, and, above all, the complex, always imperfectly resolved negotiations between religion and ethics.
17. Graham Hammill and Julia Reinhard Lupton, “Sovereign, Citizens, and Saints: Political Theology and Renaissance Literature,” Religion and Literature 38.3 (2006): 1–12.
18. This notion of “religion without religion” is articulated most clearly in Jacques Derrida’s The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), and explicated most forcefully in John D. Caputo’s The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997).
19. Eric Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953), 23.
20. Mishael Maswari Caspi, Take Now Thy Son: The Motif of the Aqedah (Binding) in Literature (North Richland Hills, Tex.: BIBAL Press, 2001), 118.
21. Bennett, “Homiletic Design in the Towneley ‘Abraham,’” writes, “There is . . . about equal scriptural warrant for and against the playwright’s having Abraham tell Isaac the reason behind his actions” (13).
22. As Derrida writes, “Reread the story: it underlines (and Kierkegaard amplified this point) the near total silence of Abraham. He never spoke to anyone, above all not to Sarah, not to his family, to no one in the domestic or public arena. This silence seems in a certain manner to be more decisive than the terrible story of the son to be put to death by his father. As though the essential test was the test of secrecy. This is true a priori, it needs no interpretation. The interpretations come afterward.” Jacques Derrida, “Above All, No Journalists!” in Religion and Media, ed. Hent de Vries and Samuel Weber (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 56–57.
23. Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, 115, in Fear and Trembling; Repetition, Kierkegaard’s Writings, vol. 6, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983).
24. Origen: Homilies on Genesis and Exodus, trans. Ronald E. Heine (Washington D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1982), 137.
25. Carol Delaney, Abraham on Trial: The Social Legacy of Biblical Myth (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 143. See especially Geza Vermes, Scripture and Tradition in Judaism (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1961).
26. Delaney, Abraham on Trial, 112.
27. The Works of Philo: New Updated Edition, trans. C. D. Younge (New York: Hendrickson, 1993), 428.
28. Martin Luther, Lectures on Genesis Chapters 21–25, Luther’s Works 4, ed. Jaroslav Pelikan (St. Louis: Concordia, 1961), 114.
29. Ibid., 98.
30. Ibid., 96.
31. Ibid., 113.
32. Ibid., 96.
33. Bruce Chilton, Abraham’s Curse: The Roots of Violence in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (New York: Doubleday, 2008), 162–63.
34. Immanuel Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties, trans. Mary J. Gregor (New York: Abari Books, 1979), 115. See in particular Jon Levenson’s discussion in “Abusing Abraham: Traditions, Religious Histories, and Modern Misinterpretations,” Judaism 47.3 (1998): 259–77.
35. Ibid., 114.
36. Ibid.
37. Levenson, “Abusing Abraham,” 260.
38. G. W. F. Hegel, Early Theological Writings, trans. T. M. Knox (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1975), 184–85.
39. Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012), 19.
40. Mark Dooley, The Politics of Exodus: Søren Kierkegaard’s Ethics of Responsibility (New York: Fordham University Press, 2001).
41. Ibid., 68.
42. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, 60.
43. Frantzen, “Tears for Abraham,” 446.
44. Quoted in Gary Kuchar’s engaging Divine Subjection: The Rhetoric of Sacramental Devotion in Early Modern England (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2005), 160.
45. Derrida, The Gift of Death, 68.
46. In this, Derrida follows Emmanuel Levinas, who gives the name “religion” to this an-economic (non) relation between self and other where neither has an advantage: “For the relation between the being here below and the transcendent being that results in no community of concept or totality—a relation without relation—we reserve the term religion” (Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis [Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969], 80).
47. Davidson, “The Sacrifice of Isaac in Medieval English Drama,” 3.
48. Ibid., 11.
49. Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida, 4.
50. E. E. Schell’s elegant and innovative argument about the Towneley is comparable to Davidson’s in that it productively explores the play’s Kierkegaardian nature (without mentioning Kierkegaard) but ultimately circumscribes the play in a strictly medieval Christian context. This particular treatment of the Old Testament story, Schell points out, begins with Abraham complaining that while the deeds of the “good and true” elders like Adam and Noah are preserved on earth, “at the end no distinction is made between good men and bad.” At the beginning of his prayer, Abraham poses a troubling and traditional question: “Whither are all our elders went?”
When I think of our elders all,
And of the marvels that have been,
No gladness in my heart may fall,
My comfort goes away full clean.
Lord, when shall Death make me his thrall?
An hundred yeares, certes, have I seen:
My fay! Soon I hope he shall,
For it were right high time I ween.
Yet Adam is to hell gone,
And there has ligen many a day;
And all our elders, everyone,
They are gone the same way
Unto God will hear their moan.
Now help, Lord Adonai!
For certes, I can no better wone,
And there is none that better may.
In order to fully understand, then, the “unintelligible and unmerited suffering of the elders,” Abraham and Isaac must endure a comparable experience “not merely as a condition of life before the incarnation but as an act of will.” Thus, while claiming to eschew Woolf’s “exclusively typological approach,” Schell actually engages in some exquisite typologizing of his own. Abraham’s refusal to tell Isaac blurs the explicit typological role of the son in this play, eliminating the consolations of a clear tie between Isaac and Christ, but, in so doing, Abraham’s “reticence” also “creates another symbolic role” for Abraham and Isaac, one wherein they are aligned with all true elders.
51. Auerbach, Mimesis, 555.
52. Ibid., 160.
53. O’Connell, The Idolatrous Eye, 28–29.
54. Ibid., 28.
55. In this version, of course, a “doctor” urges women not to “grutch” the loss of children. Ibid., 28–29.
56. Ibid., 74.
57. Ibid., 105.
58. I cite Bennett, in particular, because he is one of the first critics to consider the Towneley Abraham in relationship to Kierkegaard (he mentions him briefly on the second page of his essay). Unfortunately, Bennett misinterprets a fundamental argument of Fear and Trembling. He seems to read Kierkegaard’s famous “teleological suspension of the ethical” as meaning the philosopher was rather nonplussed by the biblical demand to kill Isaac because the demand from God supercedes the ethical imperative not to kill (“Homiletic Design in the Towneley ‘Abraham,’” 6).
59. Ibid., 274.
60. Stevens makes the case for the Wakefield master’s interweaving of the everyday and the divine throughout the “Towneley” chapter in his Four Middle English Cycle Plays (88–180).
61. Derrida, The Gift of Death, 67.
62. Ibid., 70.
63. Ibid., 71.
1. R. A. Griffiths, The Reign of Henry VI (London: Sutton, 1981), 6.
2. Ibid., 39.
3. Catherine Sanok, “Good King Henry and the Genealogy of Shakespeare’s First History Plays,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 40.1 (Winter 2010): 52.
4. Ibid., 39.
5. Ibid., 52. See also, Julia Reinhard Lupton, “Wizards of Uz: Shakespeare and the Book of Job,” in Shakespeare and Religion: Early Modern and Postmodern Perspectives, ed. Ken Jackson and Arthur F. Marotti (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2011), 163–87.
6. Edward Hall, The Union of the Two Noble and Illustrate Famelies of Lancastre and York, 249, found at The Holinshed Project (2008–2013), http://www.english.ox.ac.uk/Holinshed/toc.php?edition=1587.
7. Ibid., 250.
8. Griffiths remarks that the decision was a “unique arrangement . . . owing nothing to the precedents of 1327 or 1399” (The Reign of Henry VI, 869).
9. Michael Manheim, in The Weak King Dilemma in the Shakespearean History Play (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1973), notes that “In Hall’s chronicle, the events of Part 3 1.1 never take place” (102).
10. Eric Heinze, “Power Politics and the Rule of Law: Shakespeare’s First Historical Tetralogy and Law’s ‘Foundations,’” Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, 29.1: 139–68.
11. Randall Martin suggests the influence of the cycle plays in 3 Henry VI in particularly emotional scenes: “The jeering humiliation endured by an initially silent York resembles the Towneley cycle’s Buffeting and Scourging of Christ as well as the York cycle’s Second Trial Before Pilate and the Judgement of Jesus” (Randall Martin, ed., Henry VI, Part Three, The Oxford Shakespeare [Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2001], 15.
12. John D. Cox, Shakespeare and the Dramaturgy of Power (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 95.
13. For the range of father and son sacrificial traditions, including Daedalus and Icarus, see David Lee Miller, Dreams of the Burning Child: Sacrificial Sons and the Father’s Witness (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), 76–77, 80–81.
14. Sanok, “Good King Henry and the Genealogy of Shakespeare’s First History Plays,” 39.
15. Randall Martin, ed., Henry VI, Part 3, Folger Shakespeare Library (New York: Simon & Schuster), 280–81.
16. Larry Champion, “Developmental Structure in Shakespeare’s Early Histories: The Perspective of 3 ‘Henry VI’, Studies in Philology 76.3 (Summer 1979): 230.
17. Ronald S Berman, “Fathers and Sons in the Henry VI Plays,” Shakespeare Quarterly 13.4 (1962): 487–97, recognizes this general point without considering Abraham and Isaac.
18. John D. Caputo, The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006).
19. Martin, Henry VI, Part 3 (Oxford), 40.
20. Ibid.
21. Ibid., 39.
22. Martin, Henry VI, Part 3 (Folger), 284.
23. See Wilbur Owen Sypherd, Jephthah and His Daughter: A Study in Comparative Literature (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1948), and Debora Shuger, The Renaissance Bible: Scholarship, Sacrifice, and Subjectivity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 128–66.
24. Derrida, The Gift of Death, 85.
25. Ibid., 70.
26. See A. J. Piesse, “King John: Changing Perspectives,” in The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare’s History Plays, ed. Michael Hattaway (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 126–40, who makes comparable remarks about the opening lines.
27. Critics long have realized that the play somehow registers the transition whereby the conceptual foundations of sovereign legitimacy shifted from a belief in the divinely determined monarch to a belief in the modern nation-state. Not surprisingly, Phillip Falconbridge, the “Bastard,” has been the focus of much attention. That character offers the concluding remarks that suggest, not a ringing endorsement of young Henry’s providential reign, but something more distinctly modern: patriotic nationalism (5.7.166–24). Deborah T. Curren-Aquino aptly summarizes and helps establish something of a growing critical consensus on the play and the significance of the Bastard:
The change, as the Bastard had begun to conceive when he saw Hubert bearing Arthur in his arms, is a growing consciousness of English sovereignty as national rather than dynastic: England as the people and the land. Fittingly, but in a radical departure from orthodox Tudor ideology, England at the end of King John is “reimagined” or “refigured” in the voice of the Bastard, the one speaker who has imitated and tried on other voices, who has listened to the people’s rumors and fantasies, who has interacted with each of the play’s women, and who, as a royal bastard with rights to the land as a whole but without any legal rights in reality, “speaks in the name of England because he himself has no name, upholds the ‘unow’d interest’ because he himself owns nothing.”
The bearer of that rather mystical quality called “sovereign authority” moves from the physical body of the monarch to the body of the nation-state, itself composed of the multitude of citizens whose very birth in their native land bestowed on them rights as sovereign subjects and those bodies here are figured in the voice of the Bastard.
This “bodily” transfer of sovereignty in history is dramatically tied to Arthur’s death and the ambivalent sense in the play world that the boy is and yet is not a divinely sanctioned sovereign. In the play’s most famous line, the Bastard, watching as Hubert solemnly takes up Arthur’s corpse, makes the troubling (in)significance of Arthur’s body clear: “How easy dost thou take all England up!” (4.3.150). As Curren-Aquino and many others read it, this is the moment when the Bastard begins to realize that all England cannot reside in such a frail form, that the natural body of the king may be insufficient to house sovereign authority, that sovereign authority resides someplace grander, like the nation-state.
28. While the relationship between the anonymous Troublesome Reign and Shakespeare’s King John is still productively disputed (see E. A. J. Honigmann, “King John, Troublesome Raigne and ‘Documentary Links’: A Rejoinder,” Shakespeare Quarterly 38 [1987]: 124–30), most now see Troublesome Reign as a source for Shakespeare (Piesse, “King John: Changing Perspectives,” 126). For a recent example of a productive reading that engages both plays, see Edward Gieskes’s “He Is But a Bastard to the Time”: Status and Service in The Troublesome Raigne of John and Shakespeare’s King John,” English Literary History 65.4 (1998): 779–98. For the comparison of the two Hubert/Arthur scenes that distinctly informs my own, see Sigurd Burckhardt’s Shakespearean Meanings (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968), 116–143. For the rather surprising presence of the Abraham and Isaac plays in King John, see Rowland Wymer’s original observations in “Shakespeare and the Mystery Cycles,” English Literary Renaissance 34.3 (October 2004): 276–78. I use J. W. Sider’s edition of The Troublesome Raigne (New York: Garland, 1979), throughout.
29. Wymer, “Shakespeare and the Mystery Cycles,” 271.
30. Burckhardt, Shakespearean Meanings, 120.
31. Ibid., 120.
32. Guy Hamel, “King John and the Troublesome Raigne: A Reexamination,” in King John: New Perspectives, ed. Deborah T. Curren-Aquino (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1989), 41–61.
33. A. R. Braunmuller, “King John and Historiography,” English Literary History 55.2 (Summer 1988): 317; Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995).
1. The term “political theology” derives mainly from the writings of Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985). For the most sophisticated account of political theology in early modern literary studies, see Julia Reinhard Lupton, Citizen-Saints: Shakespeare and Political Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).
2. The locus classicus for the “king’s two bodies” is Ernst H. Kantorowicz’s The King’s Two Bodies in Mediaeval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957).
3. For a good, concise review of issues in Richard II criticism, see R. Morgan Griffin, “The Critical History of Richard II,” in Critical Essays on Shakespeare’s Richard II, ed. Kirby Farrell (New York: Hall, 1999).
4. On the concept of “king-in-parliament” and its relationship to Shakespeare in particular, see Edna Zwick Boris, Shakespeare’s English Kings, the People, and the Law (London: Associate University Presses, 1978).
5. Studies of Paul are many and varied. See in particular Günther Bornkamm, Paul, trans. M. G. Stalker (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995). See also Gregory Kneidel, Rethinking the Turn to Religion in Early Modern English Literature: The Poetics of All Believers (New York: Palgrave, 2008). Kneidel usefully reinvigorates the work of John S. Coolidge, The Pauline Renaissance in England: Puritanism and the Bible (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970).
6. On these critical lines, see Donna Hamilton, “The State of Law in Richard II,” Shakespeare Quarterly 34.1 (1983): 5–17.
7. On the play’s prophecies, see Henry E. Jacobs, “Prophecy and Ideology in Shakespeare’s Richard II,” South Atlantic Review 51.1 (1986): 3–17.
8. For serious and substantial considerations of York, see Sharon Cadman Seelig, “Loyal Fathers and Treacherous Sons: Familial Politics in Richard II” (154–71), and Sheldon P. Zitner, “Aumerle’s Conspiracy” (171–89), in Critical Essays on Shakespeare’s Richard II, ed. Kirby Farrell (New York: Hall, 1999).
9. Zitner, “Aumerle’s Conspiracy,” 172–77.
10. Phyllis Rackin, “The Role of Audience in Shakespeare’s Richard II,” Shakespeare Quarterly 36.3 (1985): 275.
11. Ibid., 279.
12. Harry Berger, “Ars Moriendi in Progress, or John of Gaunt and the Practice of Strategic Dying,” in Critical Essays on Shakespeare’s Richard II, ed. Kirby Farrell (New York: Hall, 1999), 238.
13. Six of the eight extant versions of “Abraham and Isaac,” including the Northampton/Dublin, are usefully printed together for comparison in R. T. Davies, The Corpus Christi Play of the English Middle Ages (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1972), 375–441.
14. Ibid., 410.
15. The reference is probably to “King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid,” a ballad that does depict a beggar mother pleading with a king for charity for children. But the real focus of the ballad is the king’s love for the maid. Shakespeare alluded to this ballad in Romeo and Juliet and Love’s Labour’s Lost as well.
1. Nicholas R. Moschovakis has noted the possible connection to Abraham’s sacrifice in the play (“‘Irreligious Piety’ and Christian History: Persecution as Pagan Anachronism in Titus Andronicus,” Shakespeare Quarterly 53.4 [Winter 2002]: 468].
2. See Gil Anidjar’s introduction to Acts of Religion: Jacques Derrida (New York: Routledge, 2002) for a summary statement.
3. Martin Luther, Lectures on Genesis Chapters 21–25, Luther’s Works, vol. 4, ed. Jaroslav Pelikan (St. Louis: Concordia, 1964), 108. Reuven Firestone, Journeys in Holy Lands: The Evolution of the Abraham-Ishmael Legends in Islamic Exegesis (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990), and Shalom Spiegel, The Last Trial: On the Legends and Lore of the Command to Abraham to Offer Isaac as a Sacrifice.
4. Naomi Conn Liebler, “Getting It All Right: Titus Andronicus and Roman History,” Shakespeare Quarterly 45.3 (Autumn 1994): 264, n. 6.
5. A Tragedie of Abrahams Sacrifice, trans. Arthur Golding, ed. Malcom W. Wallace (Toronto: University of Toronto, 1906).
6. Michael O’Connell, The Idolatrous Eye: Iconoclasm and Theater in Early-Modern England (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 104.
7. Debora Kuller Shuger, The Renaissance Bible: Scholarship, Sacrifice, Subjectivity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 134–35. See George Buchanan Tragedies, ed. P. Sharratt and P. G. Walsh (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1983).
8. Shakespeare certainly had the Jephthah story in his dramatic imagination in the early 1590s. Clarence says, in 3 Henry VI, “To keep that oath were more impiety / Than Jepthah when he sacrificed his daughter” (5.1.90–91). Hamlet famously taunts Polonius as a “Jepthah” (2.2.403–20).
9. Jerry Brotton, The Renaissance Bazaar: From the Silk Road to Michelangelo (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).
10. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, 74, in Fear and Trembling; Repetition, Kierkegaard’s Writings, vol. 6, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983).
11. David McCandless, “A Tale of Two Tituses: Julie Taylor’s Vision on Stage and Screen,” Shakespeare Quarterly 53.4 (Winter 2003): 487–511.
12. This is perhaps an allusion to Marlowe’s “Scythian” Tamburlaine who, in Tamburlaine the Great, Part II “sacrifices”/murders his son, Calyphas, for cowardice and incompetence and thus “approve[s] the difference ‘twixt” himself and the Turks. The deed, Orcanes says, “showest the difference ‘twixt ourselves and thee” (4.1.136–37). Tamburlaine’s gesture is also, I would suggest, an Abrahamic elaboration, a very complex one, in that it is part of Tamburlaine’s distancing of himself from Muhammad and other Muslims in the play.
13. Moschovakis, “‘Irreligious Piety’ and Christian History,” 467.
14. Ibid., 471.
15. Ibid., 467.
16. Moschovakis, “Irreligious Piety,” and Emily Bartels, “Making More of the Moor: Aaron, Othello, and Renaissance Refashioning of Race,” Shakespeare Quarterly 41.4 (Winter 1990): 433–54, aptly describe the same dramaturgy.
17. Richard Levin, “The Longleat Manuscript and Titus Andronicus,” Shakespeare Quarterly 53:3 (Autumn 2002): 323–40.
18. See in particular Deborah Willis, “‘The Gnawing Vulture’”: Revenge, Trauma Theory, and Titus Andronicus,” Shakespeare Quarterly 53.1 (Spring 2002): 21–52.
19. Philip C. Kolin, ed., Titus Andronicus: Critical Essays (New York: Garland, 1995), 33.
20. Michael Neill, “‘Mulattos,’ ‘Blacks,’ and ‘Indian Moors’: Othello and Early Modern Constructions of Human Difference,” Shakespeare Quarterly 49.4 (Winter 1998): 361–74.
21. Eldred Jones, Othello’s Countrymen: The African in English Renaissance Drama (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965). Because of this moment, Aaron “emerges as a human being and better parent than either Titus or Tamora” (59).
22. Francesca Royster, “White-Limed Walls: Whiteness and Gothic Extremism in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus,” Shakespeare Quarterly 51.4 (Winter 2000): 432–55: “We see a Rome vulnerable to outside populations, a Rome in crisis regarding its national and racial identity. This crisis escalates with the birth of Aaron’s child, when the single invader becomes two invaders. Aaron also allies himself with the Goths and joins a network of Moors, evoking the possibility of a population of invaders. Titus Andronicus stages a drama of invasion and dangerous multiculturalism, set in the mythical past all too familiar to British imaginings” (453).
23. See in particular McCandless, “A Tale of Two Tituses,” on disappointment with this “Hollywood ending.”
24. Leslie A. Fiedler, The Stranger in Shakespeare (London: Croom Helm, 1973).
25. Steven Wasserstrom, Between Muslim and Jew: The Problem of Symbiosis under Early Islam (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), demonstrates the actual conflation that took place between emergent Islam and Judaism, particularly in the formation of “the party, or Shi’a, of ‘Ali—the son-in-law and cousin of the Prophet Muhammad” that was “partially typologized upon Judaic paradigms” (55). Early Shi’a groups “were imbued with a keen Messianic longing” familiar to the Jewish tradition that allowed symbiosis of cultures. The key figure was Aaron: “for the early Shi’a, as with the Jewish sectarians of Qumran, a future redeemer would emerge from the house of the sons of Aaron. Ali’s close relationship to Muhammad stood ‘like Aaron to Moses.’” This configuration is linked to Muhammad’s own acceptance of Jews. As Wasserstrom points out, “[Muhammad] even took a Jewish wife, said to be descended from Moses’s brother, the high priest Aaron” (51).
26. Lupton, “Othello Circumcised: Shakespeare and the Pauline Discourse of Nations,” Representations 57 (Winter 1997): 83.
27. Ibid., 89, n. 38.
28. Shuger, The Renaissance Bible, 26. See also John E. Curran, The British History, Protestant Anti-Romanism, and the Historical Imagination in England, 1530–1660 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2002).
29. Moschovakis offers a wonderful discussion of this “Titus.” “Reading Titus Andronicus with reference” to this Titus “one might even be tempted to see [Shakespeare’s] Titus as a hero” (“‘Irreligious Piety’ and Christian History,” 477).
30. Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on Understanding Evil, trans. Peter Hallward (New York: Verso, 2000), 20. Slavoj Žižek has joined Badiou in offering a materialist response to the “ethical” or “religious” turn in continental philosophy. See The Fragile Absolute—Or, Why Is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For? (London: Verso, 2000) and The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003). See, also, Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, trans. Ray Brassier (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003). In many ways, this discussion is an extension of the old debate between Marxism and deconstruction. See Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routlege, 1995), and the “Marxist” response in Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx (New York: Verso, 1999).
1. For a brilliant treatment of these issues, see Lisa Freinkel, Reading Shakespeare’s Will: The Theology of Figure from Augustine to the Sonnets (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002).
2. Jacques Derrida, “What Is a ‘Relevant’ Translation?” Critical Inquiry 27.2 (Winter 2001): 174–200. See also Oona Einsenstadt, “The Merchant of Venice through the Lens of Continental Philosophy,” JCRT 8.3 (Fall 2007): 1–6.
3. For a lucid and clear discussion of this progression with particular reference to Abraham, see Jeffrey S. Siker, Disinheriting the Jews: Abraham in Early Christian Controversy (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1991).
4. For a consideration of forgiveness in relation to the impossibility of the gift, see Jacques Derrida, “To Forgive: The Unforgivable and the Imprescriptible,” in Questioning God, ed. John D. Caputo, Mark Dooley, and Michael J. Scanlon (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 21–51.
5. See Richard Halpern’s Shakespeare Among the Moderns (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997) for an extended critique of René Girard’s often-discussed essay “To Entrap the Wisest: A Reading of the Merchant of Venice” (in Literature and Society, Selected Papers from the English Institute, 1978, ed. Edward Said (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980).
6. Julia Reinhard Lupton, Citizen-Saints: Shakespeare and Political Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 100.
7. Ibid., 101.
8. Ibid., 96.
9. See Derrida’s consideration of the gift and time in Given Time: 1. Counterfeit Money, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
10. See Jon D. Levenson, “Abusing Abraham: Traditions, Religious Histories, and Modern Misinterpretations,” Judaism 47.3 (1998): 259–79.
11. Jacques Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ within the Limits of Mere Reason,” in Religion, ed. Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 34.
12. Emmanuel Levinas, Proper Names, trans. Michael B. Smith (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 74.
13. Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, in Fear and Trembling; Repetition, Kierkegaard’s Writings, vol. 6, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 115.
14. Derrida, “What Is a Relevant Translation?” 198.
15. Ibid.
16. Ibid., 199.
17. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, 68.
18. Aryeh Botwinick, “Shakespeare in Advance of Hobbes: Pathways to the Modernization of the European Psyche as Charted in The Merchant of Venice,” Telos 153 (Winter 2010): 155.
19. Julia Reinhard Lupton, “Exegesis, Mimesis, and the Future of Humanism in The Merchant of Venice,” Religion and Literature 32.2 (2000): 134. See in conjunction, Lars Engle, “‘Thrift Is Blessing’”: Exchange and Explanation in The Merchant of Venice” Shakespeare Quarterly 37.1 (1986): 20–37.
1. From Fear and Trembling; Repetition, Kierkegaard’s Writings, vol. 6, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 248. Kierkegaard, I suspect, never read Timon of Athens.
2. G. Wilson Knight, The Wheel of Fire: Interpretations of Shakespearian Tragedy with Three New Essays, 4th ed. (London: Methuen, 1949), see esp. “The Pilgrimage of Hate: An Essay on Timon of Athens,” 207–39.
3. Knight, The Wheel of Fire, 228.
4. Ibid., 224.
5. G. Wilson Knight, “Shakespeare and Theology: A Private Protest,” Essays in Criticism 15 (1965): 98.
6. Knight, The Wheel of Fire, 236.
7. See Francelia Butler, The Strange Critical Fortunes of Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1966).
8. John D. Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 194.
9. Jacques Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ within the Limits of Mere Reason,” in Religion, ed. Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 1–78, esp. 34.
10. See Coppélia Kahn, “‘Magic of Bounty’: Timon of Athens, Jacobean Patronage, and Maternal Power,” Shakespeare Quarterly 38 (1987): 34–57; Marcel Mauss, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. W. D. Halls (New York: Norton, 1990). See also Aafke E. Komter, ed., The Gift: An Interdisciplinary Perspective (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1996), and Alan D. Schrift, ed., The Logic of the Gift: Toward an Ethic of Generosity (New York: Routledge, 1997).
11. Kahn, “‘Magic of Bounty,’” 35.
12. Ibid., 41.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid.
15. Ibid., 37.
16. Ibid.
17. Derrida, Given Time: 1. Counterfeit Money, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 7.
18. Ibid., 12.
19. Ibid., 14.
20. Ibid., 39.
21. Ibid., 41.
22. Ibid., 114.
23. Quoted in The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 2–8.
24. Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida, 192.
25. Derrida, The Gift of Death, 6. This is no small transition. As Ned Lukacher remarks in Daemonic Figures: Shakespeare and the Question of Conscience (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 10, “The transformation of classical daimon into Christian conscience is one of the most important events in the history of Western thought.”
26. Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida, 192.
27. Ibid.
28. Derrida, The Gift of Death, 111–12.
29. Ibid., 114. In The Renaissance Bible: Scholarship, Sacrifice, and Subjectivity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), Debora Kuller Shuger provides a fascinating look at one seventeenth-century effort to negotiate, á la Derrida and Nietzsche, the proximity of the Crucifixion to sacrificial exchange. Hugo Grotius’s De satisfactione Christi (1617), in “an explicit defense of the orthodox theology of the Atonement,” surprisingly “throws in stark relief the primitive character of sacrificial substitution” in the Crucifixion. Shuger remarks, “I know of nothing equivalent to this anthropological explanation anywhere in Renaissance literature” (76). Shuger’s general conclusions—that more than three centuries’ “condemnations” from the culture “fall on sacrifice” (193)—correspond, I think, with my suggestions throughout that the pervasive circular (which includes sacrificial) economies of exchange are the underlying threat, that which the dramaturgy of the play seeks to expose and escape.
30. Quoted in Derrida, The Gift of Death, 114.
31. Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida, 218.
32. Ibid., 210.
33. Levinas, Proper Names, 74.
34. Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida, 208.
35. Quoted in Derrida, The Gift of Death, 64.
36. Derrida, The Gift of Death, 66, emphasis original.
37. Ibid., 65.
38. Knight, The Wheel of Fire, 221.
39. This suggests a strictly Protestant-minded thinker and is in line, perhaps, with recent suggestions that Timon of Athens is a collaborative project where one can see the hand of Thomas Middleton.
40. Knight, The Wheel of Fire, 215–16.
41. Ibid., 219.
42. Ibid., 223.
43. Derrida, The Gift of Death, 61–62.
44. Derrida, Given Time, 29.
45. Ibid., 30.
46. Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida, 192.
47. Knight offers some dramatic conclusions (The Wheel of Fire, 238–39, emphasis added):
Timon has refused the limitations of man. He has hungered for infinity and scorned all that is partial, ephemeral, limited in space, time, or any ethical code. These, his faults, are passed. Though throughout the play we have been forced to centre all our sympathies on Timon, at this last moment, when, as is customary in Shakespeare, the individual tragedy is thrown into relation with the ebb and flow of generation on generation, and human time rolls on, we see the two parts of this play, the shapes of the finite and the phantoms of the infinite, as complementary aspects of the eternal and ever-present interaction in which are both man and God. Therefore Alcibiades knows that Timon’s quenchless thirst of absolute love on earth is a “fault,” that neither man, nor his civilization, nor perhaps his God, are creatures alone of good or evil, but find their being in the constant interplay of both, the dissolution and the rebuilding, war and peace, the rebirth of the new from broken shards of the old. . . . The earthly paradise is a delusion, and Timon’s kingdom, if indeed it be existent, is not of this world.
48. Ibid., 227–28.
49. John Jowett, ed., The Life of Timon of Athens (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 81–82.