ABSTRACT
Who is Paul Shakespeare anyway? No such man is listed in the parish registries of Stratford on Avon or the Stationers Register of the Company of London. This man without qualities, “all things to all men” (1 Corinthians: 9:19) is an imaginary character, a persona grata, a creature of thought and discourse who frequents the allusive corners of Will Shakespeare’s plays. We might think of him as the product of a strange “Knock, knock” joke (Knock, knock. Who’s there? Paul. Paul who? Paul Shakespeare) in which the double knocks pound out the passage of Judaism into Christianity, of the Catholic Church into its Protestant reformation, and of Scripture into literature. First knock, Paul. Second knock, Modernity. Paul Shakespeare’s epistles include two letters to the Venetians concerning circumcision (Merchant of Venice and Othello), a very early letter to the Ephesians on marriage (Comedy of Errors, set in Ephesus), and a pair of later, deeper, and more Corinthian commentaries on marriage, liberty, and the law (Measure for Measure and All’s Well That Ends Well). The Erasmian discourse of folly takes its bearings from the Paul of 1 Corinthians and pops up in the serio-comic visions of Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Our imaginary correspondent does not fail to post a final envoi, modeled on Paul’s Maltese shipwreck in the Acts of the Apostles, namely The Tempest, which sends Paul’s achingly personal agon with universalism into orbit around the fragile singularity of the creature Caliban. 1
