Book Review: Shakespeare, the Bible, and the Form of the Book: Contested Scriptures
Saturday, January 7th, 2012Shakespeare, the Bible, and the Form of the Book: Contested Scriptures, edited by Travis de Cook and Alan Galey, Routledge, New York and London 2012.
Published in Religion and Literature 44:2, Fall 2012
This is a collection of essays about relationships between the production, dissemination and reception of books and the pairing of two books: Shakespeare and the Bible.
Many recent scholars have studied the either the Bible or Shakespeare in terms of the history of the book”ways that material media have determined their form and message. Intertextual relationships between Shakespeare and the Bible is also a familiar, if sparse, field of critical inquiry. But investigating the coupling of Shakespeare and the Bible itself with the methods of textual materialism is a novel and narrowly focused undertaking.
The editors’ discussion of Rudyard Kipling’s whimsical 1934 fantasy about Shakespeare’s drafting language of the King James Bible introduces the book’s overall polemical argument that the consideration of historical and physical conditions of texts should counter the tendency to canonize them and “naturalize” their assumed unity and completeness.
The book’s first group of essays examine ways in which Shakespeare’s use of the specific editions of the Bible he’s presumed to have read affected plot, characterization, theme and language in individual plays. (more…)