ABSTRACT
Among the most significant differences between today’s Shakespeare criticism and that of the nineteenth century may be found in that former era’s theological preoccupations. Take, for instance, two unrelated studies entitled Shakespeare and the Bible: one by Steven Marx (2000) and one by T.R. Eaton (1858). 2 These two works share a great deal. Both draw up extensive and (it should be acknowledged) highly compelling evidence for Shakespeare’s wide-ranging acquaintance with Scriptures. But whereas the twenty-first-century scholar here treats Shakespeare’s personal religious views as unknowable and in most senses irrelevant to the broader question of Biblical influence, the nineteenth-century one insists that the Bible must have brought Shakespeare to appreciate God’s “Divine will so far as regards mankind,” “the mystery of the redemption by the blood of the Saviour,” and “the change wrought in human nature by original sin.” 3 Now, Marx might (for all we know) be as religious as Eaton, but it would be hard to imagine him making claims like these, even if his editors in the Oxford Shakespeare Topics Series would allow him to do so. According to the secular logic of today’s literary scholarship, a scholar’s private views remain irrelevant to the question—and for the same reasons Shakespeare’s own views now do. Nowadays, we can speak with great confidence and authority on the ways that Shakespearean drama reflects Scriptural tradition, reifies its claims, and relies upon it more generally. But we do not, as Eaton does, see all such matters as subordinate to the overarching question of whether these also express a divinely ordained revelation.
