The Bible in Shakespeare

397 Pages·2013·2.94 MB·English

by  Hannibal Hamlin

THE BIBLE IN SHAKESPEARE
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Th e Bible in
Shakespeare
HANNIBAL HAMLIN
1
3
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,
United Kingdom
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© Hannibal Hamlin 2013
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First Edition published in 2013
Impression: 1
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ISBN 978–0–19–967761–0
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In memory of my father,
Cyrus Hamlin (1936–2011)
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Acknowledgments
Th is book is the product of many years of reading, thinking, and discus-
sion. At an early stage in my research on Th e Bible in Shakespeare , I received
generous support from Th e Ohio State University (Mansfi eld Campus)
and Th e Francis Bacon Foundation at the Huntington Library. A Freder-
ick Burkhardt Residential Fellowship for Recently Tenured Scholars (from
the American Council of Learned Societies) and a National Endowment
for the Humanities Fellowship enabled me to spend two years at the
Folger Shakespeare Library. At Th e Ohio State University (Columbus),
Valerie Lee (then Chair of English) and John Roberts (then Dean of the
College of Humanities) made it possible for me to take these two years of
research leave.
Th is was a scholar’s fantasy come true, and I am deeply grateful to these
people and institutions, and to the superb Folger staff for their assistance,
encouragement, and warm collegiality. I thank in particular Gail Kern
Paster, Richard Kuhta, Steve Ennis, Georgianna Ziegler, Steve Enniss,
Carol Brobeck, Kathleen Lynch, Elizabeth Walsh, LuEllen DeHaven,
Camille Seerattan, Rosalind Larry, and Harold Batie. Th e Folger is like
the Grand Central Station of international early modernists, and I bene-
fi ted greatly from the valuable insights and interest in this project expressed
by many of these new friends and colleagues. My co-fellows during the
fi rst year were Katherine Eggert, Linda Levy Peck, Julia Rudolph, and
Wolfram Schmidgen. We were an especially close and collegial group, and
the teas, lunches, drinks, and dinners we shared, full of true conviviality—
intellectual, cultural, social, personal––seem to me the ideal of scholarly
society. In my second year, Jonathan Gil Harris, Caroline M. Hibbard,
Erik Midelfort, Alec Ryrie, and David Schalkwyk were also stalwart com-
panions in the tea room and beyond. Others whose company I enjoyed
and benefi ted from include Kim Coles, Th omas Freeman, Gerard Kilroy,
Tobias Gregory, Anne McKeithen, Robert Miola, Jason Rosenblatt,
Rebecca Totarro, and the late Marshall Grossman, who prophesied then
that this book would take longer to complete than those two years, and
I am sorry he did not live to see how right he was.
Portions of this book have been published previously, and I am grate-
ful to Notre Dame University Press for permission to reprint, as Chapter 8 ,
“Th e Patience of Lear” from Arthur F. Marotti and Ken Jackson (eds),
Shakespeare and Religion: Early Modern and Postmodern Perspectives
(Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 2011), 127–62; and to the
viii Acknowledgments
Beinecke Library for permission to reprint, as part of Chapter 5 , “Th e
Bible, Coriolanus , and Shakespeare’s Modes of Allusion,” from Jennifer
Lewin (ed.), N ever Again Would Birds’ Song Be the Same: New Essays on
Poetry and Poetics, Renaissance to Modern ([New Haven]: Beinecke
Library, 2002): 73–91.
Many of my ideas about Shakespeare’s biblical allusions have been
tested in conference papers and discussions, and I am grateful for all those
who listened and responded, including especially Sarah Beckwith, Arthur
Marotti, Richard McCoy, Steve Mentz, and Annabel Patterson. After
more than a decade, I am sure to be forgetting many others, for which I
hope they will forgive me and accept my general thanks. In particular,
though, I thank Mark Rankin and Erin E. Kelly for inviting me to partici-
pate in an SAA seminar in 2009 on Shakespeare and Religion; Nick
Moschovakis for inviting me to lead, along with Joseph Pucci, a seminar
on Allusion at the 2010 conference of the Association of Literary Schol-
ars, Critics, and Writers; and Th omas Fulton for inviting me to join an
SAA seminar in 2012 on Reading Shakespeare and the Bible. Th e mem-
bers of all these seminars provided valuable feedback and stimulating dis-
cussion. Like anyone studying the Bible in Shakespeare, I owe an immense
debt to the labors of Naseeb Shaheen. I regret never having met Professor
Shaheen, who died in 2009, but I was pleased to be able to express my
gratitude for his work posthumously in a 2012 lecture at the opening of
the Naseeb Shaheen Antiquarian Bible Collection at the University of
Tennessee-Knoxville. Heather Hirschfeld and Jennifer Benedetto Beals
were the best of hosts at that event.
My colleagues at Th e Ohio State University have been uniformly sup-
portive and intellectually stimulating, but I would like especially to thank
Barbara McGovern, Norman W. Jones, John N. King, Richard Dutton,
Alan Farmer, Jennifer Higginbotham, Christopher Highley, and Luke
Wilson. Like many scholars, I have probably taken more good ideas from
students than I am aware of, but I acknowledge in particular my graduate
students in a rewarding seminar on Biblical Allusion in Renaissance Lit-
erature in 2010.
My editors at Oxford University Press have exhibited something like
the patience of Job in waiting for this book. Th e tidal wave that was the
400th anniversary of the King James Bible and deaths in the family swept
me away from this project, and it took some time to swim back to shore.
Jacqueline Baker has been an exemplary editor, and my many questions
about this and that were answered promptly and ably by Rachel Platt and
Jenny Townsend. I would also like to thank my production editor Shereen
Karmali, Prabhavathy Parthiban from SPi Global, and my copy-editor,
Hilary Walford.
Acknowledgments ix
Finally, I dedicate this book to my father, Cyrus Hamlin, who was at
various places (the University of Toronto and Yale) and at various times
Professor of English, of German, and of Comparative Literature. Th ough
I am not sure I remember it myself, he took me to see H amlet in Oxford
starring Derek Jacobi when I was 5 years old. Apparently, when the ghost
appeared, I crouched down behind the seat in front, peering fearfully over
the top. Th ough a specialist in German Romanticism, my father taught
both Shakespeare (at Toronto, with Northrop Frye) and the Bible (at Yale,
with Hans Frei), and he was keen on my work on the Bible in Shakespeare
from its earliest days. Sadly, he did not live to see the book fi nished and
in print. Th e rest of my family, both Hamlins and Martins, have lived
with this book a long time, and I thank them for their patience. My wife,
Cori Martin, has been as always my muse, my best editor, and my staunch-
est support. She will also be more pleased than anyone that this book is
fi nally done.