ABSTRACT
David's use of poetry in the Bible at highly meaningful moments of his life is thus enacted in George Peele's David and Bethsabe, in which the mutuality of experience between the natural and the human worlds is reflected in the King's use of the epithalamium to celebrate his tryst with Bethsabe and in his use of the elegy to mourn the deaths of his two sons. Peele's transformation of the epithalamium maintains major consequences, therefore, for the pastoral mode—in terms of the relationships between the natural and human worlds, and between the human lovers themselves. In the French biblical drama, the reciprocal metaphoric transformation of the natural and the human worlds effects an eroticization of the former while introducing nature's energy and vitality into the human body. Peele's concern with kingship necessarily turns to the interface between biblical drama, and the Elizabethan family and monarchy.
