ABSTRACT

This chapter discusses the play The Love of King David and Fair Bethsabe. It focuses on the ways in which George Peele's play, David and Bethsabe, enacts the parables of Nathan and the Tekoite Woman within both its historical and intertextual contexts. It is indeed fascinating that the extensive Davidic narrative in the second book of Samuel contains two parables, situated at critical moments in his reign. Complementing the parable's process of judgment in David and Bethsabe is the first chorus, which develops a complex intertextuality that evokes the biblical text as well as both homiletic and poetic responses to the Bible. The raven's feasting on carrion is, in essence, an image of both deviant sexuality and murder; whether he be any anonymous person, or the eponymous Lopez, the criminal is judged and executed in a horrendous embodiment of justice.