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The Biblical Presence in Shakespeare, Milton and Blake: A Comparative Study (review)
- Common Knowledge
- Duke University Press
- Volume 8, Issue 2, Spring 2002
- pp. 415-416
- Review
- Additional Information
- Purchase/rental options available:
Common Knowledge 8.2 (2002) 415-416
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Book Review
he Biblical Presence in Shakespeare, Milton and Blake:
A Comparative Study
Harold Fisch, The Biblical Presence in Shakespeare, Milton and Blake: A Comparative Study (Oxford: Clarendon, 1999), 331 pp.
This book is dedicated to Geoffrey Hartman and directed—with a delicacy characteristic of its author—against Harold Bloom. Hartman seemed destined, once, to revise literary history in a mode compatible with deconstruction; Bloom assumed that responsibility instead, but in the process left the precious (in both [End Page 415] senses) delicacies (in both senses) of deconstruction behind. Harold Fisch, as his parting gift (I attended his funeral in Jerusalem a few days before writing this review), has revised Bloom's hermeneutics of influence in a direction less Freudian and more—oxymoronically—deconstructive and Oxonian. Like the original Old Critics, the Christian humanists, Fisch attends to the compatibility of the classical legacy and the biblical; but like Hartman, he shows how "chasms and contradictions . . . are deeply buried in the texture" of the sacred texts. Ambivalence, he hints—in the keenest whisper of an intense yet soft-spoken career—is less an individual problem than a cultural achievement. Amen to that, H. F.; and (binding the Hebrew term of closure to a Latin tag) requiescat in pace.
—Jeffrey M. Perl
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