Beyond a Common Joy: An Introduction to Shakespearean Comedy

4. Biblical Story and Festival Enter Shakespearean Comedy

 q  Biblical Story and Festival Enter Shakespearean Comedy The ultimate prophetic or vatic book for Shakespeare’s contemporaries was the Bible—both the Hebrew Bible (or Old Testament) and the New Testament. The Bible was the center of the prophetic visions studied by Elizabethan Bible readers, and its prophecies offered possible visions of the future in an unstable age. It also offered prophetic testimony, admonishing the age and its individuals to reform.Thinkers from Ficino down to Shakespeare, following Socrates’analysis of the Furies in Phaedrus –, spoke of a prophetic or Apollonian Fury that rivaled the other furies: the poetic or Muses’ fury; the love or Venus’ Fury; and the Dionysiac Fury, the fury of superstition or of genuine religious revelation.Theseus speaks of the last three of these Furies or frenzies in the great Midsummer Night’s Dream “fine frenzy” speech analyzed in chapter  when he speaks of the poet, the lover, and the madman. In Othello, Shakespeare goes on to have Othello name the fourth, the prophetic fury, in his second extended speech about Desdemona’s handkerchief: ’Tis true.There’s magic in the web of it. A sibyl that had number’d in the world The sun to course two hundred compasses, In her prophetic fury sewed the work; The worms were hallowed that did breed the silk; Biblical Story and Festival Enter Shakespearean Comedy  And it was dyed in mummy which the skilful Conserved of maidens’ hearts. (..–; italics mine) Othello’s sibyl with her prophetic seizures and her magic is sister to Virgil’s Cumaean sibyl and, as we shall see, to Prospero. With the prophetic Cumaean sybil Shakespeare combines the related prophetic furies of the biblical prophets such as Isaiah, and he also uses the New Testament prophets such as John the Baptist and the Magi.This does not mean that the Shakespearean biblical mythos draws only on the conception of the prophetic fury. In writing of comedic families, he also employs biblical family struggles—JacobLaban , Cain and Abel, the family in Ephesus—and draws in a few Christological stories. He uses all these biblical stories as he uses the sacred stories of the Greeks and Romans—for their figurative application within the drama on the stage. The biblical text, taken as a unit extending from Genesis and the Fall to the Apocalypse and final rejoicing, appears to be a vast cosmic comedy beginning with the adversity of a Fall in a garden, descending into history with its wanderings, and ending happily with the prophecy of a divine marriage and group unification in the activity of the “the Spirit and the Bride” (Rev. :). At some very general level every Shakespearean comedy emulates that pattern. At the level of more precise biblical intertexts, as early as  one of the first of the comedies, The Comedy of Errors, plays with the Ephesian settings in Acts or Ephesians, and as late as –, the last of the comedies, The Tempest, does much the same thing with the Isaiah setting. Between these lie significant uses of extended biblical intertexts in almost every play that the Folio treats as a comedy, almost all focusing on the renewal of the individual and the social order.1 Figurative Exegesis, Hamlet’s “Tropical,” and Biblical Pattern Biblical texts do not come into the comedies as something in the mode of which Shakespeare creates anew, as he does with the myths.2 His handling of the biblical intertext is as cautious as one would Biblical Story and Festival Enter Shakespearean Comedy  expect from a public entertainer writing in a time when no topic was more likely to promote controversy than how one used the Bible. This chapter does not catalogue Shakespeare’s allusions to the Bible; previous scholars and critics have addressed this task repeatedly and well. Using this earlier work, however, I look at a few situations where a biblical story, biblically based feast, or feast-text (and sometimes its popular commentary, especially in the Geneva Bible) becomes a controlling or significant reference or intertext, and suggest a method for approaching these Shakespearean biblical intertexts. This discussion of method does not attend much to the detail of disputes about Early Modern biblical hermeneutics. For example, Erasmian and post-Erasmian Catholic exegesis may appear to be more literalistic than its medieval equivalent, although Erasmus loved Augustine’s allegory-making De Doctrina Christiana. The common modern accounts make Luther...