The Biblical Presence in Shakespeare, Milton, and Blake: A Comparative Study (review)

The Biblical Presence in Shakespeare, Milton, and Blake: A Comparative Study. By Harold Fisch. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999. Pp. xiv + 331. $80.00 cloth.

This immensely learned, wide-ranging book by last year's recipient of the Israel Prize blurs distinctions between artistic creation (poetics) and interpretation (hermeneutics) by involving both in a dialogue with an authority that paradoxically constrains and frees. This encounter, which Harold Fisch calls "covenantal hermeneutics" (159), is easiest to find in Milton, where the bard of Paradise Lost,following the voice of the muse Urania, soars "above the flight of Pegasean wing" (7.1-4); where the epic's Adam, like Abraham, Moses, and Job in the Bible, both submits to and expostulates with his author, God; and where Nazarite Samson acquires power by limiting himself: "Abstemious I grew up and thriv'd amain; / He led me on to mightiest deeds / Above the nerve of mortal arm" (Samson Agonistes,ll.637-39). In the great epic and tragedy, a productive tension is generated by the authority of the prior texts of Genesis 1-3 and Judges 13-16, respectively, and the openness of Milton's midrashic interpretations of those biblical passages. Fisch's best readings approximate the encounter between the commanding voices of what he calls "thethree poets" (vii) and an interpretive freedom that often chooses to measure them against the standard of his own reading of Scripture.

Fisch finds this dialogic relationship even in Shakespeare, where he sets Hamlet's revelational encounter with the ghost of his father (1.5) over against the Sinai theophany and the Israelites' entry into covenant with God (Exodus 19ff). Hamlet alludes to the two tables of the decalogue ("my table" [1.5.98]) and the commandment to honor one's parents when he declares, "thy commandment all alone shall live / Within the book and volume of my brain, / Unmixed with baser matter" (1.5.102-4). For Fisch the two principal ways of interpreting this scene remain perpetually unresolved. The first is to read it as an example of lex talionis,deriving from the genres of Greek and Roman literature and thus resembling other moments in Renaissance revenge tragedies. Another way is to see Hamlet willingly entering into a covenant with his father's authoritative spirit, embarking on "a voyage of self-discovery" (116); like Bunyan's Pilgrim, "he is the man with a burden on his back, a seeker after salvation" (116).

Fisch makes things conspicuously difficult for himself by devoting the first 150 pages of his study of biblical influence to Shakespeare, who plunders his sources so thoroughly that there is no trace of them in his voice, and by beginning with two decidedly nonbiblical plays, Julius Caesarand Antony and Cleopatra. He concentrates on what he terms the met-agon,a struggle for control of the play between biblical and nonbiblical approaches to life and art. Practicing a sort of virtual hermeneutics, he claims that Shakespeare's first audience would have interpreted the actions of the pagan Roman world of Julius Caesarby the light of the Bible. Just as Pompey, dead before the play begins, is yet a presence opposing Caesar, who falls dead at his statue's feet, so is the absent Bible, implicitly opposed to the tragic ideal, present in the play.

Fisch expresses strong opinions. He points to the dangers of tragedy, pastoral, myth, pure aesthetics, closure, monologic discourse (including the narcissism implicit in lyric), the romantic imagination, and much more. Thinking of Frazer and Nietzsche rather than Freud, he finds two primal scenes in Shakespeare's Roman plays that take the audience back to the ritual beginnings of tragedy: the conspirators bathing themselves in Caesar's blood up to the elbows after having spoken of carving him up as a sacrifice to the gods (2.1.172-74; 3.1.105-7), a reenactment of the festival of Dionysus; and Cleopatra's death...