Shakespeare's Bible

Notes towards an entry for the new Shakespeare Encylopedia

Coverdale’s translation of the Psalms; attractive modern edition, in pdf

1559 Book of Common Prayer in HTML pages

1552 Book of Common Prayer (Edward IV) in HTML pages

Geneva Study Bible in original spelling; searchable. 1599 translation; appears distinct from 1560? Glosses are included in search.

Geneva Bible, pdf’s of a modern transciption; spelling corrected; not a facsimile; not searchable (?).

Job in Islam (I)
Job in Islam (II)
DRAFT ENTRIES FOR SHAKESPEARE ENCYLCOPEDIA: Responses welcome!!

Article on Pety Job / Office of the Dead

Marcionite Prologue to Paul’s Epistles

BIBLE entry
1500-3000 words

Separate short entries on:

BIBLE, GENEVA. The Geneva Bible was edited between 1557 and 1560 by a group of Protestant exiles living in Geneva, Switzerland during the Catholic Queen Mary’s reign. Geneva itself was alive with the theology and Biblical scholarship associated with the Protestant reformer John Calvin. The main translators were William Whittingham and Anthony Gilby; other contributors included John Knox, Christopher Goodman, Thomas Cole, John Pullain, and Thomas Sampson (Danner). The new text relied on both earlier English translations, especially work by William Tyndale and Myles Coverdale, but the authors also referred to the original Greek and Hebrew texts. They filled the margins of the text with often polemical Calvinist glosses. The first edition was published in Geneva in 1560. Although it was dedicated to the new Queen, Elizabeth I, the intensity of its Calvinism made it suspect to the ruling circle, and it was not printed in England until 1575. Although the Church of England sponsored its own Bible during Elizabeth’s reign (see BISHOPS BIBLE), the Geneva Bible was more popular.

BIBLE, BISHOPS’. The Bishops’ Bible was designed to compete with the popular GENEVA BIBLE of 1560 and to replace the outdated Great Bible of Henry VIII, first printed in 1539. The Bishops’ Bible was produced under the direction of Matthew Parker, Archbishop of Canterbury. Its frontispiece depicts Queen Elizabeth flanked by secular allegories of Mercy and Justice, representing the New and Old Testaments and the principles of royal power. In his own words, Parker “distributed the bible in partes to dyuerse men” for translation and editing; the result has been judged of uneven quality. It was also intentionally bland: Parker instructed his team to “make no bitter notis [notes] upon any text, nor yet to set down any determinacion in places of controversie.” The Bishops Bible was reprinted 43 times between 1568 and 1644, less than a third of the printings received by the Geneva Bible (140 printings beginning with in 1560). Shakespeare’s plays reflect knowledge of both the Bishops Bible and the Geneva Bible, though the Geneva Bible is more prominent.

BIBLE, KING JAMES. The King James Bible of 1611 was designed to supplant the militantly Calvinist GENEVA BIBLE, in circulation since 1560. It also aimed to update and replace the Bibles associated with previous monarchs (the Great Bible under Henry VIII and the BISHOPS’S BIBLE under Queen Elizabeth I). James I assumed a much stronger role in relation to the new bible than had his predecessors, and the dedication declares him the “principal Mover and Author” of the Bible that bears his name. James launched the project at the Hampton Court Conference of 1603, a special session with Anglican and Puritan leaders convened by the king early in his reign. At the conference, James asked “that especiall paines … be taken … for one uniforme translation” of the Bible. He disliked the Geneva Bible because its glosses were “very partiall, untrue, seditious, and savouring too much, of dangerous, and trayeterous conceites,” and he asked that the new edition avoid controversy. The Bible was translated by a group of fifty-four scholars who worked together to produce a fresh and consistent rendering of the Greek and Hebrew texts, with constant recourse to earlier English translations. They took the BISHOPS BIBLE as their basis but referred to many others, including the GENEVA BIBLE. By the time the first King James Bible was printed in 1611, Shakespeare had written most of his plays.

Bibliography for short Bible entries (selected!!):
Danner, Dan G. “The Contribution of the Geneva Bible of 1560 to the English Protestant Tradition.” Sixteenth Century Journal 13:3 (1981): 5-18.

Betteridge, Maurice S. “The Bitter Notes: The Geneva Bible and Its Annotations.” The Sixteenth Century Journal, 14.1 (Spring, 1983): 41-62.

BIBLE
1. Shakespeare’s Bibles
The English word “Bible” translates the Greek word biblía, meaning “books.” Just as the singular noun “bible” is assembled out of a plurality of texts and traditions, so too, Shakespeare’s Bible is not one book, but many. It consists first and foremost of the Old and New Testaments, each itself divided into many books and sections. Shakespeare would have absorbed the Bible from several sources. William Tyndale’s New Testament of 1526, followed by the Pentateuch (first five books of the Old Testament) in 1520, were the first Bibles to be translated into English from Greek and Hebrew, not Latin, and to appear in print, not in manuscript. Myles Coverdale completed Tyndale’s work in 1535, and Thomas Matthew reworked Tyndale and Coveral into a new Bible published in 1537, which became the basis of the Great Bible of 1539-41, the official Bible of the Church of England under Henry VIII.

The most important Bibles for Shakespeare, however, were the BISHOPS’ BIBLE and the GENEVA BIBLE. The Bishops Bible, the official book of the Anglican Church under Elizabeth, was designed for use in church services. The Geneva Bible, more strongly Calvinist in its glosses, was largely used for household study and private reading. The division, however, was not sharp, and both books would have showed up in liturgical and in domestic settings. The presence of these Bibles can be discerned in Shakespeare’s plays, the Bishops Bible perhaps more prominently in his earlier plays and the Geneva Bible in his later plays (Noble); most critics agree that the Geneva Bible has made the greater impact on Shakespeare’s vocabulary and diction.

Scriptural language entered Shakespeare’s world by means other than printed copies of the Bible itself. The Book of Common Prayer (1559) prescribed a calendar of readings designed to cover key portions of the Old Testament, the New Testament, and the Psalms over the course of the year. Other Biblical passages were incorporated directly into the Book of Common Prayer as prayers and readings for special holidays and occasions, largely using translations traceable to Tyndale and Coverdale. When Shakespeare cites the Ten Commandments, he seems to have the Book of Common Prayer in mind (Noble 16), its precepts instilled by the early repetitions of catechism more than by the active assimilation of personal reading. And Biblical language would also have entered Shakespeare’s discourse through oral conduits, such as homilies, sermons, and an everyday speech colored by Biblical phrases.

The Geneva Bible, the Bishops’ Bible, and the Book of Common Prayer – three pillars of the English Reformation in the second half of the sixteenth century – stake out the central zone of Shakespeare’s Biblical consciousness. Yet other bibles did exist during the period, at further removes from Shakespeare’s language yet still forming a part of his larger world. During Shakespeare’s lifetime, but towards the end of his career, King James I authorized the production of his own Bible, published as the KING JAMES BIBLE in 1611. Although its diction would have had little impact on Shakespeare’s plays, the playwright might well have taken an interest in the collective political and theological enterprise that the King James Bible represented, as critics have argued with reference to Measure for Measure (Barnaby and Wry). The Douai-Rheims Bible was a translation published for and by English Catholics beginning in 1582. Although it was illegal to own a copy in Protestant England, the translators of the King James Bible did use it in their work, and it’s possible that Shakespeare would have read a Rheims Bible through his Catholic contacts or his own family. The Bible was also available in Latin and Greek editions, though we have no evidence that Shakespeare ever used them. [**].

At the far edges of Shakespeare’s Biblical imagination lies the Hebrew Bible, which began appearing in print in 1482, spurring study and translation by Christian scholars at Oxford and Cambridge as well as on the continent (Mihelic). In The Jew of Malta, the Jew Barabas pretends to lend his “comment on the Maccabees” to young Mathias (II.iii.157), reflecting some exchange of books among Jews and Christians, though in a distant, and demonized, Catholic setting. In The Merchant of Venice, Shylock does not speak of special books, but he does read the Old Testament in a manner that Shakespeare marks as distinctively Jewish. Even further on Shakespeare’s scriptural horizon stands the Koran, a kind of anti-Bible or counter-Bible for the Christian West; the sacred book of Islam is directly represented in Marlowe’s play Tamburlaine, Part II, but again only enters Shakespeare peripherally — for example, in the Marlovian figure cut by Othello as a former member of a monotheistic counter-covenant consecrated to a jealous God.

Shakespeare’s Bible functioned as a single and singular text — the Good Book, the Book of Books, unified by the central Christian narrative of creation and fall, exodus and covenant, incarnation and redemption. This single story was itself formed, however, out of overlapping and sometimes competing translations and commentaries as well as several media (print, spoken and recited word, everyday speech). In both the authority of its message and the diversity of its sources, Shakespeare’s Bible functions like a strong light emerging against a dark background, its basic shape strong and unmistakable but its edges oddly pixilated.

2. Biblical allusions in Shakespeare
The presence of the Bible in Shakespeare’s language proves neither his godliness nor his ascription to any particular sect; it does demonstrate the resilience and variety of Biblical expression as it entered the English language during the great age of Biblical translation. Shakespeare’s language is too thick with Biblical references to pursue a full accounting here. A few exemplary cases, however, can serve to reveal the scope and complexity of Shakespeare’s Biblical imagination, which ranged freely among the spheres of ethics, theology, anthropology, sociology, and humor.

A. Ethics: the case of Measure for Measure
Biblical language often enters Shakespeare’s dramas in the form of proverbial expressions and recollected parables rather than developed theological statements or specific narrative scenarios. At the opening of Measure for Measure, the Duke tells Angelo,

Heaven doth with us as we with torches do,
Not light them for ourselves; for if our virtues
Did not go forth of us, ‘twere all alike
As if we had them not. (I.i.32-35)

Shakespeare’s most immediate reference is the image of the candlestick from Matthew and Luke, rendered in the Geneva Bible as:

Neither doe men light a candle, and put it under a bushel, but on a candlesticke, and it giveth light unto all that are in the house. (Matthew 5.15)

The parable argues for active virtue in the world; when I venture to act and speak in public, my behavior becomes a light onto others, showing them how to act. The commentators who wrote the Geneva Bible chose this passage for the frontispiece of their 1562 Bible, running the biblical verse around a picture of a seven-armed Jewish menorah. (The 1560 Geneva Bible depicts the parting of the Red Sea during Exodus, dramatizing the authors’ own exile and return to England.) The Geneva commentators clearly envisioned their own work as a collective candelabra providing active illumination to English readers. In Measure of Measure, Shakespeare uses the Biblical citation to explore both the power and the risk of performing virtue, of making virtue appear to others by exercising it out in the open, through public office and public speech. For Angelo, lighting the candle of his virtue ends up setting him aflame with a corrosive passion that threatens to consume him in lies and self-deception. Isabella, too, is almost burned – by Angelo’s obscene advances, but also by her own chaste reticence — when she finds herself pushed into the scene of public life from the enclosed space of the convent. In Measure for Measure, candlesticks can be dangerous as well as illuminating, both to those who risk performing their virtue and to those who witness them.

Measure for Measure is the only work by Shakespeare to take its title from the Bible: the phrase comes from Matthew:

For with what judgement ye judge, ye shalbe judged, and with what measure ye mete, it shalbe measured to you again. (Matthew 7:2; Geneva Bible).

In everyday speech, the phrase “measure for measure” was usually used to represent retributive justice, the idea that the punishment should equal the crime. Yet it carries what amounts to the opposite meaning in Matthew, where it warns that those who judge their fellow humans harshly will be judged with equal harshness by God above. The Duke uses the phrase when he enjoins Isabella to abandon Angelo to the dictates of justice:

An Angelo for Claudio; death for death. Haste still pays haste, and leisure answers leisure. Like doth quit like, and Measure still for Measure. (V.i.407-409)

In the scene, the Duke’s argument pointedly uses the retributive reading of the phrase, yet the passage from Matthew stands behind it, conveying a very different message of mercy. The Duke in effect tests Isabella’s scriptural knowledge against the received wisdom of everyday life: will she accept the Duke’s retributive message, or look deeper for Matthew’s argument for mercy? Throughout the play, Shakespeare invites his characters, and his audience, to compare and evaluate different forms of proverbial discourse. This exercise of Biblical speech in public contexts for the purpose of appraisal and experiment is, we might say, the special candlestick that Shakespeare’s play sets in the window of public life.

2. Theology: the case of Hamlet
Proverbial wisdom is ethical more than theological, involving the quotidian exercise of virtue and wit in the human world rather than matters of salvation. Yet Shakespeare’s plays, though never didactic, do sometimes venture into higher theological territory. In Hamlet, much of the prince’s vision is characterized by a sense of the deep fallenness of God’s creatures. For Hamlet, the world is an “unweeded garden,” and “things rank and gross in nature possess it merely” (I.ii.135-6), recalling the fall from Eden’s bounty into a landscape of “thornes … and thistles” (Gen 3.18; Geneva). The play is bemired in the first chapters of Genesis, with their stories of marriage, fall and fratricide. Hamlet’s unweeded garden is not a secular world — in which civil society has effectively replaced religion — so much as a profane world, a landscape characterized by the sublime distance between the Creator and His creatures, who have fallen away from their maker into a realm of base matter. When Hamlet exclaims against Claudius that he “took my father grossly, full of bread,” (III.iii.80), he likely echoes Ezekiel 16:49: “Behold, this was the iniquitie of thy sister Sodom, Pride, fulnesse of bread, and abundance of idleness” (Geneva Bible; Noble 27). “Fulnesse of bread” expresses Hamlet’s disgust with the heavy forms of corporeal enjoyment, at once solid and sullied, that afflict the fallen world. There may be Eucharistic echoes as well, since the Ghost from Catholic purgatory may have been sated on the bread of the Mass, seen by Protestant reformers as basely materialist (Greenblatt).

The play is haunted by Exodus as well as Genesis. There is something Moses-like in Hamlet’s inscription of the Ghost’s “command” on the “tables” of his mind. (Compare Exodus, where God delivers the Ten Commandments on “tables of stone” (Ex. 24:12; Geneva). The sublimity and terror of the Ghost’s revelation to his son increases Hamlet’s terrible sense of burden, adding the weight of the law to the heaviness of the flesh.

For most of the play, Hamlet feels himself cursed by rather than in charge of the mission delivered by the Ghost. Yet Hamlet’s revolted materialism and his subjection to his father’s command are the preconditions for his transformation in Act V, which he again couches in the language of the Geneva Bible. Hamlet tells Horatio:

There is special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ‘tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all. Since no man, of aught he leaves, knows aught, what is’t to leave betimes? Let be. (V.ii.215-20)

The sparrow falls into Shakespeare’s text from Matthew:

Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing, and one of them shall not fall on the ground without your Father? (Matt. 10.29; Geneva Bible)

In this phase of the drama, Hamlet stills the restless anxiety of “To be or not to be” by entrusting himself to the simpler “Let be” of God’s plan, reshaping his own passive tendencies into a form of action. The “Let be” of providential time allows Hamlet to live more fully in this world, which he suddenly apphrehends as providing an “interim” for action: “It will be short. The interim is mine” (V.ii.73-4). In Hamlet, Shakespeare plumbs the depths of the Bible’s theological language, expressing a creaturely materialism defined by life in its deeply mortal aspects, yet providing openings for human action.

3. Sociology and anthropology: the case of Othello
We expect ethics and theology from Shakespeare’s Bible, but Shakepeare’s views of human society and cultures can also at times be traced to Scriptural sources. In Othello, Shakespeare, like many of his contemporaries, derives some of his ideas about race and ethnicity from Biblical stories and motifs. The Song of Songs, the Hebrew Bible’s erotic pastoral interlude, may have provided an underlying theme for the play: “I am blacke (O daughters of Jerusalem, but comelie” (1.4; Geneva Bible), linked by Christian commentators to the theme of Gentile conversion (the expansion of Christianity from the Jews to all peoples). The coupling of Othello and Desdemona echoes the universal vision celebrated by Paul in Colossians: “Where there is nether Grecian nor Jewe, circumcision nor uncircumcision, Barbarian, Scythian, bonde, fre: but Christ is all and in all things” (Col 3:11; Geneva). But other themes from the Bible are less inclusive. When Jeremiah poses the question, “Can the blacke More change his skin, or the leopard his spottes?” (Jer. 13:23; Geneva), the answer is presumed to be negative (Loomba). Does Othello stand in the line of Ham, the son of Noah whose progeny were punished with blackness because he saw his father naked? Or is Othello a type of Balthazar, the African King who visited the manger of Jesus in stories of the Epiphany, reversing Ham’s sin by entering into the scene of Gentile conversion?

Another strand of Biblical imagery in the play associates Othello with idolatry, the promiscuous practice associated with foreign peoples in the Hebrew Bible (Winiarksi). In a powerful and recurrent set of analogies, idolatry (multiple gods) is associated with adultery (multiple partners), a parallelism implicitly activated by Othello’s tragedy of both idolatrous adoration and iconoclastic destruction of his beloved. The most famous editorial crux of the play involves Biblical materials: When Othello throws away his precious “pearl,” does he act like “base Indian” (or foreign idolater, as the Quarto would have it), or like a “base Judean” (like Herod or Judas, figures of Jewish intransigence to Christian conversion), as the Folio reading implies? Throughout Othello, Biblical materials, far from simplifying the ethnographic terrain explored by Shakespeare in this drama, offer competing models for conceiving relationships among peoples and faiths.

4 Humor: Bible jokes
Biblical language need not be sage and serious. In Measure for Measure, Lucio and his friends tell jokes about the Ten Commandments (I.ii.6-16), a genre with its roots in Rabbinic midrashim (exegetical stories) about the giving of the Biblical law, and with many variants still circulating today. In All’s Well That Ends Well, the Clown speaks in jests so colored by Calvinism that they weigh heavily on modern ears. The sublimity of Bottom’s Dream, which

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 (MSND, IV.i.209-12)

borrows its ratios from Paul’s account of divine revelation in 1 Corinthians: “The eye hath not seene, and the eare hath not heard, nether have entred the heart of man” (1 Cor. 2.9; Bishops [Shaheen]).

Selected Bibliography

Barnaby, Andrew, and Joan Wry, “Authorized Versions: Measure for Measure and the Politics of Biblical Translation.” Renaissance Quarterly 51 (1998): 1225-54.

Greenblatt, Stephen. Hamlet in Purgatory. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001.

Jenkins, Harold, ed. Hamlet. London: Methuen, 1982.

Ania Loomba, “Othello and the Racial Question” in Shakespeare, Race, and Colonialism (Oxford, Oxford UP, 2002)

Lyotard, “Jewish Oedipus.”

Mihelic, Joseph. “The Study of Hebrew in England.” Journal of Bible and Religion. 14.2 (May 1946): 94-100.

Milward, Peter, S.J. Biblical Influences in Shakespeare’s Great Tragedies. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987.

Noble, Richmond. Shakespeare’s Biblical Knowledge. NY: Octagon Books, 1970.

Shaheen, Naseeb. Biblical References in Shakespeare’s Comedies. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1993.

Winiarksi

Lewis Lupton, hand-drawn chronology of dates leading up to the Geneva Bible.

Lewis Lupton, hand-signed title page

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