Shakespeare & Abraham by Ken Jackson (review)

In Shakespeare & Abraham, Ken Jackson establishes the significance of the biblical figure of Abraham in a reading of Shakespeare’s plays that draws on and engages with modern philosophy, theology, and critical theory. In Genesis 22, Abraham is commanded by God to sacrifice his son: Abraham can either devote himself to his God or his son, but he cannot do both. For Jackson, the story of Abraham suggests that responding to the call of the wholly ‘Other’ (God) requires ignoring the call of one’s own ‘other’ (i.e., other people). While Jackson cites Shakespeare’s use of the Abrahamic ‘Hineini’ (‘Here I am’), Shakespeare & Abraham is not a ‘traditional study of literary borrowing or influence that primarily seeks to link Genesis 22 and Shakespeare via philological evidence’ (p. 1). Rather, Jackson seeks to examine how the influence of Genesis 22 and its interpretive tradition is seen in ‘the critical, conceptual framework that Shakespeare develops to think through … the relationships between religion, sovereignty, law and justice’ (p. 1). In other words, Jackson is interested in how Shakespeare uses Genesis 22 both ‘to understand the world’ (p. 2) and ‘to think’ (p. 9).

Shakespeare & Abraham is divided into seven sections, an Introduction, and six chapters. In Chapter 1, Jackson analyses the apparent model for Shakespeare’s Abrahamic thinking: the Towneley (Wakefield) cycle plays that dramatise the Abraham and Isaac story. In Chapters 2 to 6, Jackson connects several of Shakespeare’s early plays (3 Henry VI, King John, Richard II, Titus Andronicus, The Merchant of Venice, and Timon of Athens) with various meditations on Abraham in primarily modern critical, religious, and philosophical thought, especially the work of philosophers Søren Kierkegaard, Emmanuel Levinas, and Jacques Derrida, critics Eric Auerbach and G. Wilson Knight, and religious scholars Geza Vermes, Bruce Chilton, and Jon Levenson.

For Jackson, 3 Henry VI and King John re-contextualise ‘weak sovereigns’ in more positive Abrahamic terms. Henry’s struggles are understood in terms of a ‘commitment to a divine “Other” that compromises his responsibilities to this world’ (p. 45). Henry’s sacrifice of his son Edward, by disinheriting him, for what appears to be a ‘social good’ (p. 49) and a response to a ‘call for peace and justice’ (p. 50) is juxtaposed with Clifford’s brutal murder of young Rutland simply for revenge. Clifford’s savagery also draws parallels with King John where Hubert’s attempted murder of young Arthur is cast by Shakespeare as an Abrahamic sacrifice that is ‘never called for or demanded’ (p. 61), and which comes close to casting the question of sovereign legitimacy and divine right as ‘a matter of violence and force’ (p. 58).

Jackson’s analysis of Richard II investigates how Genesis 22 provides further background for the fundamental political theology that the play examines: the question surrounding divine right and sovereign legitimacy, and a divine ‘Law beyond the law’ (p. 63) that demands total commitment. Richard II is a play which begins and ends with scenes in which fathers are asked to sacrifice sons: John of Gaunt indirectly participates in the banishment of Henry Bolingbroke, and the Duke of Aumerle, as a traitor. York stands out in stark contrast to both Richard II and Gaunt as an embodiment of ‘devotion to the divine Law beyond the law that both Richard and Gaunt incorrectly assumed they possessed’ (p. 74).

In the chapter on Titus Andronicus, Jackson contrasts the pre-Christian Titus with the pre-Muslim Aaron the Moor. Titus and Aaron differ in their willingness to sacrifice their children for the ‘Other’ (the Roman state being a stand-in for the divine). Jackson views Aaron’s refusal of the command to kill his son not as compassion, but rather an instance of someone who has ‘no desire for the absolute Other’ (p. 89) and thus refuses to offer an Abrahamic gift of sacrifice.

The last two chapters of Shakespeare & Abraham focus on the characters of Shylock and Timon of Athens. Both...