Abstract
The Biblical Covenant in Shakespeare argues that the theopolitical idea of covenant derived from the Hebrew Bible enabled Reformed theologies and polities, and was the biblical beating heart of Shakespeare’s secular-seeming drama. The Introduction provides an overview of the argument in which covenant partnerships, based on mutual commitment, trust, and engagement are key to the reformed polities that Shakespeare maps suggestively onto family and marital relationships, commercial relationship in the multiethnic city, relationships within a relatively democratic public theatre, and, finally, the relationship between a ruler and his people. Because the Bible was the one book audiences would have had in common, seeding the plays with allusions to familiar stories invited audiences to wrest from the plays their full ethical significance.
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Notes
- 1.
Marcia Pally, Commonwealth and Covenant: Economics, Politics, and Theologies of Relationality (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2016), 8, 17.
- 2.
Achsah Guibbory, Christian Identity, Jews, and Israel in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 4.
- 3.
Marcia Pally, Commonwealth and Covenant, 183.
- 4.
Daniel Elazar, Covenant and Commonwealth: From Christian Separation through the Protestant Reformation (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1996), 241. In Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan, the need to enforce covenants is the primary justification for instituting a sovereign authority, and covenant is the mechanism for the transfer of sovereignty from the people to the sovereign. Andrew Martin, “Moses, Leviathan, and the Kingdom of God: Covenant Theologies and Political Legitimation in Early-Modern England” (Ph.D. dissertation, Vanderbilt University, 2016).
- 5.
Craig Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation: The Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan Press, 1998), 141–147. Muldrew, citing many examples of Puritans who invoke God as guarantor of economic solubility, argues that covenant theology shaped ideas of moral right (understood as the equality of the potential to be trusted).
- 6.
Jonathan Dollimore, Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology, and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 11–12. Citation from Calvin’s Institutes, 1 3.2.
- 7.
Walter Brueggemann argues that prophetic covenantal religion from its inception in biblical Israel through the Reformation and up to the present moment “endlessly authorized rebellion. Walter Brueggemann, Texts that Linger, Words that Explode: Listening to Prophetic Voices (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2000), 9.
- 8.
Robert N. Bellah, The Broken Covenant: American Civil Religion in Time of Trial (New York: The Seabury Press, 1975).
- 9.
Philip Gorski, “The Mosaic Moment: An Early Modernist Critique of Modernist Theories of Nationalism,” American Journal of Sociology 105.5 (March 2000): 1428–1468. Although Gorski concentrates on the symbols and stories from the Old Testament that authorized the Dutch revolt against Spain and the formation of the Calvinist Dutch republic, he notes that Hebrew imagery abounded in early modern England in godly ballads, political pamphlets, public rituals, Protestant preaching, and popular prints “to name the best documented media.” Gorski, 1452.
- 10.
Graham Hammill grasps the centrality of Moses to early modern political life, but he detaches what he calls “the Mosaic constitution” from the covenant idea that used biblical narratives—patriarchal, Mosaic, and historical—to authorize the development of constitutional politics from theological relationships. Graham Hammill, The Mosaic Constitution: Political Theology and Imagination from Machiavelli to Milton (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2012), 2–3.
- 11.
John Bale, King Johan, ed. Barry B. Adams (San Marino, CA: The Huntington Library, 1969), 102. See Richard Helgerson, “Shakespeare and Contemporary Dramatists,” A Companion to Shakespeare’s Works, Vol. 2, The Histories (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003): 29. Helgerson concludes a discussion of “elect nation plays” with the claim that Shakespeare’s focus on “the problematics of early-modern kingship” excludes the concerns of other dramatists, such as the good works of citizens. In my readings, family bonds and bonds of association between aristocrats are crucial to the overarching covenantal framework for which he subtly advocates.
- 12.
Guibbory, Christian Identity, Jews, and Israel, 33. Beatrice Groves, The Destruction of Jerusalem in Early Modern English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). Groves studies the influence of the Hebrew Bible and Jewish history on Reformation England’s sense of national identity.
- 13.
Edward Vallance, Revolutionary England and the National Covenant: State Oaths, Protestantism and the Political Nation, 1553–1682 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2005), 22.
- 14.
Michael Walzer, The Revolution of the Saints: A Study in the Origins of Radical Politics (New York: Atheneum, 1969), 78–85
- 15.
Historian Michael Bennett notes that there was a widespread belief that Henry achieved the throne because of a “covenant with the people.” Michael Bennett, Richard II and the Revolution of 1399 (Gloucestershire: Sutton Publishing Limited, 1999), 204. Shakespeare picks up this early version of covenant, derived from Magna Carta, and fuses it with federalism, making covenant the core idea of an emergent political nation.
- 16.
Peter Womack, evoking Benedict Anderson’s idea that any nation must be imagined, suggests that the audience is being enlisted to imagine England. See Peter Womack, “Imagining Communities: Theatres and the English Nation in the Sixteenth Century,” in Culture and History 1350–1600: Essays on English Communities, Identities and Writing, ed. David Aers (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1992), 93.
- 17.
Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Darmstadt and Neuweid, Germany: Hermann Luchterhand Verlag, 1962), trans. Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989), 38–39. Regina Schwartz, Sacramental Poetics at the Dawn of Secularism: When God Left the World (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), 12.
- 18.
Walter Brueggemann, The Covenanted Self: Explorations in Law and Covenant (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1999), 2.
- 19.
I use the adjective “decentered” to invoke Dollimore’s anti-humanist critique of the notion that human selves are autonomous, individuated essences but complicate it with a reminder that, biblically, the soul is metaphysically derived from a decentered transcendent YHWH (“I will be what I will be”). Dollimore, Radical Tragedy, 254. See also Linda Gregerson, The Reformation of the Subject: Spenser, Milton, and the English Protestant Epic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 6. Covenant is the “discipline” Gregerson describes without using the concept when she characterizes the subjects of epic as—“radically contingent—political, devotional, erotic in its contours and consequences”—and reciprocally fashioned.
- 20.
My work dovetails with that of Graham Hammill on the important play of exegetical imagination. Hammill notes that for Milton and Spinoza the Bible was sacred because it was a common text that preserved community by fostering intellectual debate. My work suggests that this was also Shakespeare’s view of the Bible. Hammill, The Mosaic Constitution, 3.
- 21.
Harold Fisch, Hamlet and the Word: The Covenant Pattern in Shakespeare (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1971), 5. The use of obviously imperfect Old Testament characters may be one of the ways Reformation artists and writers combated idolatry. Gregerson, Reformation of the Subject, 5.
- 22.
Tessa Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 214.
- 23.
Jennifer Waldron, Reformations of the Body: Idolatry, Sacrifice, and Early Modern Theater (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 2, 9. Waldron avoids terms like “secular,” which she believes are misleading and shows instead how playwrights such as Shakespeare exploited trends in Reformation thinking—like the shifting of sacred space to the horizontal plane—and contributed to the enchantment of ordinary material reality.
- 24.
Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 212–214.
- 25.
Gabriel Josipovici, On Trust: Art and the Temptation of Suspicion (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 102. Josipovici sees Shakespeare firmly embedded in the craft tradition, describes his work as weaving together older narrative materials into a new vernacular context.
- 26.
Alice Goodman, “Falstaff and Socrates,” English: The Journal of the English Association 34.149 (Summer 1985): 110 . Goodman suggests that Desiderius Erasmus’s notion of imitation as assimilating the deep truths of an earlier work in a new creation influenced Shakespeare. She references one of Petrarch’s letters that recommends planting allusions deeply so that “the similarity … can only be extracted by quiet meditation” and is “felt rather than defined.” Letters from Petrarch, selected and translated by Morris Bishop (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1966), 198–199.
- 27.
Steven Marx, Shakespeare and the Bible (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 103–104. Gregerson, The Reformation of the Subject, 5. Spenser and Milton create a “dialectical function for the readership” as a means of combating the idolatrous potential of words. In the same vein, Emrys Jones remarks that Shakespeare’s plays “see ‘full’ to us because we help to fill them.” Jones, The Origins of Shakespeare (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), 17.
- 28.
Anthony Dawson, “Shakespeare and Secular Performance,” Shakespeare and the Cultures of Performance, ed. Paul Yachnin (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008): 83–100. Dawson cites this episode as an example of the secularizing impulse of Shakespeare’s theatre while I see it as part of the hybridizing work that is part and parcel of developing a civil religion.
- 29.
John Kerrigan, Shakespeare’s Binding Language (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). Swearing and oaths are marked by verbal formulae that do not hold, while covenants involve verbal and even physical negotiation and moral reasoning that is often imagined through physical metaphors of apprehension and wrangling.
- 30.
John Foxe, Foxe’s Book of Martyrs: Select Narratives, ed. John N. King (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 15; Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 99.
- 31.
Foxe, Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, 72.
- 32.
David Scott Kastan, “’The Noyse of the New Bible’: Reform and Reaction in Henrician England,” in Religion and Culture in Renaissance England, eds. Claire McEachern and Debora Shuger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 47.
- 33.
Stephen Greenblatt mentions the 1538 injunction in his chapter on William Tyndale in Renaissance Self-Fashioning, 98. For a discussion of the 1543 act and response to it, see Kastan, “’Noyse of the New Bible’,”59–60.
- 34.
Naseeb Shaheen, Biblical References in Shakespeare’s Plays (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1999), 28. From 1576, when the Geneva Bible first began to be printed in England, until 1611, when Shakespeare’s dramatic career was almost over and the King James Bible appeared, ninety-two editions of the complete Bible were published in England.
- 35.
Hannibal Hamlin, The Bible in Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 39.
- 36.
John Whalley, God’s Plenty, Feeding True Pietie (1616). Cited in Felicity Heal, “Experiencing Religion in London: Diversity and Choice in Shakespeare’s Metropolis,” in Shakespeare and Early Modern Religion, eds. David Loewenstein and Michael Witmore (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 61.
- 37.
Beatrice Groves, Texts and Traditions: Religion in Shakespeare 1592–1604 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007), 10–11. 15 21. Groves makes a telling observation about the Nine Worthies play in Love’s Labour’s Lost: Shakespeare points out that biblical illiteracy (confusing Judas Maccabeus with Judas Iscariot) can destroy a theatrical presentation. It is also significant that Erasmian rhetorical training deprecated explicit reference in favor of Imitation: “Thus we writers must look to it that with a basis of similarity there should be many dissimilarities. And the similarity should be planted so deep that it can only be extracted by quiet meditation.” Jones, Origins of Shakespeare, 15.
- 38.
Anthony Dawson, who makes a case for the theater as a secular institution recognizes that religious references enhance audience participation. Dawson, “Shakespeare and Secular Performance,” 91.
- 39.
Michael Bristol recognizes that Shakespeare’s plays elicit moral reasoning but he limits vernacular response to one that proves for excised motive, imagines scenes alluded to but unwritten, and brings to bear ordinary life experiences on plays whose hermeneutic density he likens to “some of the stories in Scripture.” He missed the face that Shakespeare had a very high opinion of vernacular capacities and uses biblical allusions to stimulate analogical thinking about dramatic cases of applied ethics. Shakespeare and Moral Agency, ed. Michael D. Bristol (London: Continuum, 2010), 5. See also Michael Bristol, “Vernacular Criticism and the Scenes Shakespeare Never Wrote,” Shakespeare Survey 53 (2000): 89–102.
- 40.
Robert Alter, The Pleasures of Reading in an Ideological Age (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996), 116.
- 41.
Hamlin, Bible in Shakespeare, 81.
- 42.
Joseph Pucci, The Full-Knowing Reader: Allusion and the Power of the Reader in the Western Literary Tradition (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 43.
- 43.
Charles Whitney, Early Responses to Renaissance Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 1, 66.
- 44.
Steven Marx is right to suggest that the “extended type or pattern of Henry V’s story is Israel’s miraculous deliverance from Egypt through the Red Sea. An emblematic woodcut of this episode appeared on the Geneva Bible title page. Steven Marx, Shakespeare and the Bible (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 42–43.
- 45.
I do think there is a profound link between the Chorus’ language and the language of preachers as described by Patrick Collinson in “Biblical Rhetoric: The English Nation and National Sentiment in the Prophetic Mode,” in Religion and Culture in Renaissance England , Claire McEachern and Debora Shuger, eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 29.
- 46.
Paul Stevens refers to this Chorus as “a passionate and imperative advocate of the imagination.” In his study of the Shakespearean presence in Paradise Lost, he suggests that Shakespeare figured for Milton imagination as a vehicle of faith. Although Stevens wants to read the playwright as a secularizing force, I think the Henry V Prologue proves that the link between imagination and faith is present in Shakespeare, and that Milton was a fine reader. Paul Stevens, Imagination and the Presence of Shakespeare in Paradise Lost (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 7.
- 47.
Jeffrey Knapp, Shakespeare’s Tribe: Church, Nation, and Theater in Renaissance England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 119–120.
- 48.
E. Brooks Holifield, The Covenant Sealed: The Development of Puritan Sacramental Theology in Old and New England, 1570–1720 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1974), 51. Holifield notes that Calvin was the theologian of English Puritan pastors.
- 49.
John Calvin, Commentaries on The First Book of Moses, Called Genesis, Vol. I, tr. Rev. John King (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House), 451. From Calvin’s discussion of circumcision.
- 50.
Calvin, Commentaries on Genesis, 1: 452.
- 51.
Marilynne Robinson, Givenness of Things: Essays (London: Virago, 2015), 35.
- 52.
Waldron, Reformations of the Body, 29.
- 53.
Calvin, Commentaries on Genesis, 1: 258.
- 54.
John Milton, “Areopagitica,” Selected Prose, ed. C.A. Patrides (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1985), 236–237.
- 55.
Paul Ricoeur, Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative, and Imagination (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1995), 226.
- 56.
Brueggemann, Covenanted Self, 4.
- 57.
Milton, “Areopagitica,” 238.
- 58.
Elazar, Covenant and Commonwealth, 151.
- 59.
William Tyndale, Doctrinal Treatises and Introductions to Different Portions of the Holy Scriptures, ed. Henry Walter (Cambridge: Parker Society, 1848), 403, 469, quoted in Michael McGiffert, “William Tyndale’s Conception of Covenant,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 32 (Apr. 1981): 167–168.
- 60.
Tyndale, Doctrinal Treatises, 403; McGiffert, “William Tyndale’s Conception of Covenant,” 167.
- 61.
Tyndale, Doctrinal Treatises, 470, quoted in McGiffert, “William Tyndale’s Conception of Covenant,” 170. McGiffert notes that this statement in Tyndale’s revised prologue to Matthew (1534) was the apogee of Tyndale’s covenant theology.
- 62.
Tyndale, Doctrinal Treatises, 398, 399, 401–403.
- 63.
Elazar, Covenant and Commonwealth, 165.
- 64.
Heinrich Bullinger, One Eternal Covenant, in Charles S. McCoy and J. Wayne Baker, Fountainhead of Federalism: Heinrich Bullinger and the Covenantal Tradition (Louisville, KY: John Knox Press, 1991), 115.
- 65.
Bullinger, One Eternal Covenant, in McCoy and Baker, Fountainhead of Federalism, 113.
- 66.
McCoy and Baker, Fountainhead of Federalism, 52.
- 67.
Waldron, Reformations of the Body, 47. Hannibal Hamlin also stresses the importance of Calvin’s commentaries for Shakespeare, singling out the Sermons on Job. He also cites Jonathan Bates notation that a likely source of books for Shakespeare was the printer Thomas Vautrollier, with whom Stratford friend, Richard Field, was apprenticed. Apparently, Vautrollier’s stock of books was large religious, including among others, Calvin’s Institutes. Hamlin, Bible in Shakespeare, 34.
- 68.
Walzer, Revolution of the Saints, 152; Calvin, Commentaries on Genesis, 1: 258.
- 69.
Waldron, Reformations of the Body, 47.
- 70.
Elazar, Covenant and Commonwealth, 178. Calvin, Commentary on Genesis, 2: 258.
- 71.
McGiffert, “William Tyndale’s Conception of Covenant,” 181–184. He discusses the perpetuation of Tyndale’s ideas in reprints of his writings (through the 1570s) and in the translations of Miles Coverdale, whose authorized version of the complete Bible (1535) used all of Tyndale’s work. For a discussion of the way Bullinger’s federalist ideas were spread to England, through, among others, Miles Coverdale, see McCoy and Baker, Fountainhead of Federalism, 32–34.
- 72.
Walzer, Revolution of the Saints, 92.
- 73.
Elazar, Covenant and Commonwealth, 240.
- 74.
John Foxe, Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, 54; Walzer, Revolution of the Saints, 97. Vallance, Revolutionary England and the National Covenant, 7.
- 75.
Walzer, Revolution of the Saints, 98.
- 76.
Walzer, Revolution of the Saints, 105. Patrick Collinson notes that because many of the English exiles in Geneva advocated such resistance, they had no hope of political influence under Elizabeth. Collinson also cites evidence that several of these English divines had friendships with Bullinger. Patrick Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 46.
- 77.
Walzer, Revolution of the Saints, 125.
- 78.
Collinson, “Biblical Rhetoric,” 19–20. Hannibal Hamlin notes that open air sermons “were among the major entertainments in London life.” Hamlin, 36.
- 79.
Elazar, Covenant and Commonwealth, 239. Holifield discusses the role covenant played in the pastoral ministry of conforming preachers like William Perkins. Holifield, The Covenant Sealed, 39–41.
- 80.
Collinson, Elizabethan Puritan Movement, 50–51, 85, 89–90. Many have noted that Shakespeare’s friars are generally positive characters.
- 81.
Robert Browne, “A True and Short Declaration, Both of the Gathering and Joining Together of Certain Persons; and also of the lamentable Breach which Fell amongst Them,” in R. Tudor Jones, Arthur Long and Rosemary Moore, ed., Protestant Nonconformist Texts, vol. 1, 1550–1700 (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2007), 61.
- 82.
Michael McGiffert has done the authoritative scholarship on covenant theology written by Elizabethan divines. Michael McGiffert, “Covenant, Crown, and Commons,” Journal of British Studies 20 (Autumn 1980): 52. McGiffert, “Grace and Works: The Rise and Division of Covenant Divinity in Elizabethan Puritanism,” The Harvard Theological Review 75 (Oct. 1982): 464. McGiffert, “From Moses to Adam: The Making of the Covenant of Works,” The Sixteenth-Century Journal 19 (Summer 1998): 131–155.
- 83.
Edward Vallance, Revolutionary England and the National Covenant, 14.
- 84.
Edward Vallance, Revolutionary England and the National Covenant, 21, 23.
- 85.
Edward Vallance, Revolutionary England and the National Covenant, 216.
- 86.
Quentin Skinner, Visions of Politics, Vol. 3, Hobbes and Civil Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 179–181.
- 87.
Collinson, Elizabethan Puritan Movement, 51.
- 88.
Collinson, Elizabethan Puritan Movement, 175.
- 89.
Collinson, Elizabethan Puritan Movement, 175.
- 90.
Paul Whitfield White, Theatre and Reformation: Protestantism, Patronage, and Playing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 4. Grace Tiffany concurs, noting that the Puritans were “diverse constituents of the London Renaissance theater audience rather than … a uniform, self-marginalized antitheatrical group.” See Grace Tiffany, “Puritanism in Comic History: Exposing Royalty in the Henry Plays,” Shakespeare Studies 26 (1998): 256–287, 257.
- 91.
Beatrice Groves, Texts and Traditions, 17. The popularity of biblical material in stage plays and even the prevalence of biblical subtext in Shakespeare’s plays from the 1590s suggests that there may be more overlap between “play-haunters” and “sermon-gadders” than Jeffrey Knapp, whose work deals with the religious tones of playhouse culture, acknowledges. Knapp, Shakespeare’s Tribe, 6.
- 92.
Huston Diehl, Staging Reform, Reforming the Stage: Protestantism and Popular Theater in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), 2.
- 93.
Diehl, Staging Reform, Reforming the Stage, 3.
- 94.
Ben Jonson, Bartholomew Fair, in Complete Plays, Vol. 2 (London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1957), 181. Jonson deployed covenantal language in the self-styled “Jewish” fellowship he sought to create with other theater people who were “sealed” of “the tribe of Ben.” See Jeffrey Knapp, Shakespeare’s Tribe, 45–47.
- 95.
David Womersley, Divinity and State (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 120
- 96.
Womersley, Divinity and State, 120.
- 97.
Katherine Gillen, “Authorial Anxieties and Theatrical Instability: John Bale’s Biblical Plays and Shakespeare and Wilkins’s Pericles,” in Stages of Engagement: Drama and Religion in Post-Reformation England, eds. James D. Mardock and Kathryn R. McPherson (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 2014), 171–194, 190–191.
- 98.
John Bale, A Tragedye or Enterlude Manyfestying the Chefe Promises of God unto Man ([Wesel: Dirik van der Straten, 1547?]). Early English Books Online: Text Creation Partnership, http://eebo.chadwyk.com/home.
- 99.
On the irrevocability of covenant as distinct from contract, see Pally, Covenant and Commonwealth, 188.
- 100.
Ritchie D. Kendall, The Drama of Dissent: The Radical Poetics of Nonconformity, 1380–1590 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1986), 122.
- 101.
Steven Marx, Shakespeare and the Bible, 9–10. Marx reminds us that medieval miracle plays brought God on stage in three of his biblical roles: creator, savior, and judge. Marx suggests that the God of the Bible is present in Shakespeare, only disguised as a man or woman. I think the Lord of Shrew is one such character.
- 102.
Richard Cromwell (Oliver’s successor) evidently read the Induction as a call narrative, because he likened himself (in a speech to Parliament!) called to lead England, to the “Tinker” … made to “believe himself a Lord.” Charles Whitney, Early Responses to Renaissance Drama, 267.
- 103.
Stephen Greenblatt, “Fiction and Friction,” Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988): 66–93.
- 104.
Shakespeare uses “covenant” seven times in the canon (three times in Cymbeline (1610), twice in Henry VI, Part One (1591), once in Taming of the Shrew (1590), and once in Richard II (1595). See Shakespeare Concordance, http://opensourceshakespeare.org/concordance, s.v. “covenant.” By contrast, he uses “bond,” 73 times. The eighth definition in the OED is “an agreement or engagement binding on him who makes it” and 8b. specifies “bond” as a “covenant between two or more persons.” See OED, s.v., “bond, n.”
- 105.
See Hannibal Hamlin’s discussion of modes of allusion. Bible in Shakespeare, 112–120.
- 106.
Cynthia Marshall notes that “rules defining the audience are crucial in marking any game or playing space.” Marshall, “Wrestling as Play and Game in As You Like It,” SEL 1500–1900 32 (Spring 1993): 265–287.
- 107.
Charles Hallett, “Scene Versus Sequence: Distinguishing Action from Narrative in Shakespeare’s Multipartite Scenes,” Shakespeare Quarterly 46 (Summer 1995): 183–195. Hallett argues that Shakespeare structures dramatic sequences as duets between propelling and resisting characters. Mustapha Fahmi, “Shakespeare and the Orientation of the Human,” Harold Bloom’s Shakespeare, eds. Christy Desmet and Robert Sawyer (London: Palgrave, 2001), 99. Fahmi suggests that a dialogic context is the crucial framework for the creation of ethical identities, and my work with covenant historicizes and enriches his general observation.
- 108.
Debora Shuger, Political Theologies in Shakespeare’s England: The Sacred and the State in Measure for Measure (London: Palgrave, 2001), 55, 69. Shuger erroneously believes that constitutional issues of the ensuing decades remain largely irrelevant” to Measure for Measure and its historical moment. Constitutional issues are inherent in the covenant idea.
- 109.
Elazar, Covenant and Polity in Biblical Israel: Biblical Foundations and Jewish Expressions (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1995), 2. Graham Hammill mistakenly attributes the distinction between God’s omnipotence and God’s acceptance of covenantal constraints to the fourteenth-century scholastic philosopher, William of Ockham, when the distinction is biblical. Hammill, The Mosaic Constitution, 6–7.
- 110.
Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 59. Helgerson is sensitive to the ways that poets’ choices—rhyme over quantitative verse or chivalric narrative over classical epic—are “forms of resistance to the totalizing encroachment of royal authority.
- 111.
Walzer, The Revolution of the Saints, 172. Walzer charts the shift in analogies used to figure the polis from state as body to state as ship. When Henry allows the men to dispute with him, the organic analogy that rationalizes monarchy (in which monarch is the head and subjects are the limbs) is subtly replaced by federalism, in which the king is one among a company of reasonable men.
- 112.
This idea originated with Calvin, who first switched the emphasis of political thought from the prince to the saint (or the band of saints). See Michael Walzer, The Revolution of the Saints, 1–2.
- 113.
Calvin, Commentaries on Genesis, 2: 195.
- 114.
Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., s.v. “sheep-biting.”
- 115.
Diehl, Staging Reform, Reforming the Stage; Waldron, Reformations of the Body; Brian Cummings, Mortal Thoughts: Religion, Secularity and Identity in Shakespeare and Early Modern Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).
- 116.
Milton, “Areopagitica,” 212–223. Jason Rosenblatt affirms my intuition that in imagining his struggling twins, Milton was thinking of Jacob and Esau . See Rosenblatt, Torah and Law in Paradise Lost (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 56.
- 117.
Hamlin, Bible in Shakespeare, 66. Richmond Noble also suggests that “literary allusion involves the reader or spectator in a working partnership with the author.” Richmond Noble, Shakespeare’s Biblical Knowledge (New York: Octagon Books, 1935), 23.
- 118.
Hamlin, Bible in Shakespeare, 59, 73, 85.
- 119.
Pucci, Full-Knowing Reader, 39.
- 120.
Julia Reinhard Lupton, Citizen-Saints: Shakespeare and Political Theology (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005), 13.
- 121.
Ken Jackson, Shakespeare and Abraham (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 2015), 24, 5.
- 122.
Graham Hammill, The Mosaic Constitution, 3.
- 123.
Lupton’s work on Hamlet in her later book, Thinking with Shakespeare, challenges Schmittian political theology as applied to the play in his Hamlet and Hecuba. Lupton suggests that Schmitt’s desire to map James I’s history onto Hamlet (both suffered the murder of fathers by men who would marry their mothers) is a forced attempt to discover “sovereign stabilities” in a play where the legitimate king is a ghost, his successor a fraud, and the titular character “commits the most extraordinary verbal abuse on the tropes of political theology … [i.e.] the king is a thing of nothing.” Julia Reinhard Lupton, Thinking with Shakespeare: Essays on Politics and Life (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2011), 72, 92.
- 124.
Fisch, Hamlet and the Word, 9.
- 125.
I borrow the force field concept from Fisch, who thinks that earlier texts exerted a shaping power on Shakespeare’s imagination. Harold Fisch, “Power and Constraint: Covenantal Hermeneutics in Milton,” in Summoning: Ideas of the Covenant and Interpretive Theory, ed. Ellen Spolsky (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 1.
- 126.
Donna Hamilton, Shakespeare and the Politics of Protestant England (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1992), 40.
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Kietzman, M.J. (2018). Introduction. In: The Biblical Covenant in Shakespeare. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71843-9_1
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