The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 26.348  Tuesday, 28 July 2015

 

From:        Hardy Cook <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>

Date:         July 27, 2015 at 2:48:37 PM EDT

Subject:    From TLS - Shakespeare and Abraham

 

[Editor’s Note: I have been catching up on TLS and discovered a number of Shakespeare –related articles. I will provide excepts here; and if anyone wishes the entire article and does not have access to TLS, please contact me at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. -Hardy]

 

Not to God

NEIL FORSYTH

 

Ken Jackson

SHAKESPEARE AND ABRAHAM

176pp. University of Notre Dame Press. Paperback, $27.

978 0 268 03271 5

 

Published: 17 June 2015

 

How do you set out to write yet another book about Shakespeare? Well, you might write a book about a completely different topic – the sacrifice of Isaac in Genesis 22, say – and then squeeze our myriad-minded author in at various points along the way, as if Shakespeare were really writing about that same topic, without telling us. In doing so you would be enlisting Shakespeare in a line of philosophers, mostly Continental, from Kant and Kierkegaard to Derrida, who have explored the topic. You could then join that line of theorists by adding your own musings, in the guise of an explication of a few scenes from Shakespeare.

 

Hence Shakespeare and Abraham. Shakespeare often dramatizes the relations of parents and children, and indeed scenes of child-killing or near child-killing fill the early plays. The Akedah, the binding of Isaac by his father Abraham, is about the same topic. Never mind that Shakespeare never alludes to the story, or scarcely mentions Abraham, still less Isaac. He was not allowed to dramatize biblical stories. Philosophically speaking, however, Shakespeare is constantly reworking the biblical narrative. He begins to do so as early as 3 Henry VI and keeps it up till at least Timon of Athens. He uses Genesis 22 “to understand the world – and to pray”. This is why his “Abrahamic explorations” also turn up in unexpected places, such as the trial of Shylock.

 

For Ken Jackson, Shakespeare is not the secular, modern writer so many critics construct: he is a deeply religious thinker. So an ingenious argument, which Jackson admits is “risky”, links the killing of young Rutland at the opening of 3 Henry VI to Abraham’s treatment of Isaac. The saintly Henry’s treatment of Edward turns the Macchiavellian Margaret into a variant of the biblical Sarah angrily pleading for her son: the Duchess of York will later plead in the same way for Aumerle in Richard II. Abraham is not actually mentioned in the play, but what of that? “Shakespeare sets the call to respond to the absolute Other (justice) in contrast to the call to respond to one’s own (Edward)”, which is obviously “within the religious logic of Abraham’s ‘Here I am’”, his repeated response to God’s call. And then there is King John, where the death of the young Arthur suggests further parallels. All of this points to “a deeply complex and devout religious responsiveness”.

 

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