TO ASSUME, OR NOT TO ASSUME: Defamiliarization & Allusion in Shakespeare & the Bible

[Illustration: Bottom the Weaver from Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream, by Arthur Rackham, 1939]

In the last few years, I have been reading as many books and essays about Shakespeare and religion as I can get my hands on, and among the many things that strike me is this: Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, and other critics can read the same text and come away with very different interpretations, even paying attention to the same details. Of course, this makes perfect sense, and Shakespeare implies that this will happen through certain lines in Hamlet.

Readers or viewers bring different assumptions to their experience of the plays, and they often exercise a kind of confirmation bias, noticing details that confirm their assumptions or biases. We all do this, of course, and in part, it's what makes academic research interesting: to discover what people with different experiences, assumptions, and biases make of the same text.

But when you've been wrestling with the angels and demons of a text for a while, some of these divergent views can be somewhat annoying for how limited they can be to a certain set of assumptions.

Certain critics would like to believe that Hamlet undergoes a positive transformation and, in the end, is deserving of the words translated from the requiem mass which Horatio speaks over his corpse: “flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.” These include certain Protestant and Catholic scholars.

Other critics like Roy Battenhouse and Arthur McGee are certain Hamlet is hell-bound. They seem to miss certain details and cherry-pick: Battenhouse really wants Hamlet to have a navel-gazing, rule-observing Christian spirit that would love his enemy Claudius and refrain at all costs from killing the king, because he may be a murderer but, eh, maybe he'd make a good king. McGee is certain the Ghost is from hell because of evidence in the play and in other works of the time, so he assumes Shakespeare is not breaking from the established conventions, and if he kills the king, he must be obeying the demonic spirit, and cannot be doing it for any other more nuanced reasons than to avenge his father's death, certainly not to act as the true king and execute a murderous usurper.

Many of these readings are certainly insightful in their own ways, but some in particular seem somewhat superficial in their exploration of possible biblical allusions. For example, David Kaula, in a 1984 essay, “Hamlet and the Image of Both Churches,”(1) notices that Hamlet says Claudius has “whored” his mother, so he claims that Claudius echoes the Antichrist, Gertrude the Whore of Babylon, and their sinfulness seems to represent corrupt Roman Catholicism. Hmm...

If we cherry-pick our allusions to match our biases, then we may end up looking silly when another critic comes along, like Stephen Greenblatt, who observes that Gertrude and Claudius have fore-shortened their mourning (to Hamlet's dismay), don’t seem to believe in purgatory or a prolonged mourning period, so they represent for Greenblatt classic aspects of Protestantism in that way.(2)

Perplexing, for Gertrude and Claudius to represent Catholicism and its vices, AND the Protestant doctrinal position on Purgatory, BOTH (but only one at a time, from the point of view of different readers?).

If we don't look more deeply into the texts, then we are merely playing bingo with the allusions and our assumptions about them. Like Hamlet toying with Claudius about what he sees in the clouds, Shakespeare is toying with us as we treat his play like a Rorschach blot, projecting our biases.

(A high school science teacher of mine used to write on the board, “When we ASSUME, we make an ASS out of U and ME”... hence the Arthur Rackham illustration of Bottom the Weaver...)

Even classic works that have attempted to catalog all the known biblical allusions in Shakespeare seem to carry a certain Protestant bias that is focused excessively on The Word, meaning English Protestant approved Bible translations available in Shakespeare's time, and the specific words and phrasings found in those. They prefer exact words and phrases over what seem to be, or clearly are, paraphrased allusions where an idea from a scripture passage has been made incarnate in a new way, or "translated," as Peter Quince says of Bottom.

Recall that Jewish and Christian scriptures are a collection of books written mostly in Hebrew and Greek, so Catholic translations in Latin, the Vulgate, and all other known translations such as into English, were not the original language of the scriptures. It was popular for Reformation bible translators to try to translate from the Greek or Hebrew rather than the Latin Vulgate, a translation that carried Roman Catholic biases. Of course, the Protestant translations and their published notes in the margins carried Protestant biases, but at least the question of how to achieve the best possible translation was being considered anew. Translation was a controversial topic, perhaps explaining some of the richness of joke implied in Peter Quince's use of the word.

The succession of major works cataloging biblical allusions in Shakespeare included books by Bishop Charles Wordsworth (1864), Thomas Carter (1905), Richmond Noble (1940), and Naseeb Shaheen (1989). All of these had what could be argued as conveying a Protestant and scientific bias focused more on phrasing that matched translations in Shakespeare's time. Protestant bias made them prefer the phrasing of known bibles, and scientific/empirical bias made them be exacting in their discernments about the textual comparisons. It's interesting to note that in the same year as Bishop Wordsworth's publication, 1864, the pre-Raphaelites were also embracing the age's blossoming excitement about science and empiricism.(3) Five years earlier, Charles Darwin had published his famous The Origin of Species.

So in the 1860s, in Charles Wordsworth, we see a combination of English nationalism that is fiercely Protestant, anti-Catholic and claiming Shakespeare fully one of its own, combined with the bardolatry of the Victorian era; add to this science and empiricism having an even greater influence on art and literature, and this explains in part why study of Shakespeare and the Bible can seem to newcomers as a hair-splitting venture focused more on phrasing and cataloging allusions than on meaning and implications for interpretation.

A number of scholars have advocated a different approach that might move us beyond our habitual assumptions and help us think to explore biblical allusions a bit more deeply. Julia Kristeva (who coined the term, “intertextuality”[4]) and Robert Alter (author of The Art of Biblical Narrative[5]) both advocate thinking of allusions as opportunities to view both texts in light of each other, the alluding text, and the text being alluded to. This is a good start.

In a 2007 essay called "The Case of Allusion",(6) Robert Kawashima adds to this the idea of defamiliarization, borrowed from Russian literary theorist Viktor Shklovsky and claims that, at best, this is what allusion does: it challenges us to revisit familiar texts in new contexts, thereby adding an element of the strange and of defamiliarization: A new opportunity to revisit what we may assume we already know.

So maybe a key to transcending our habitual biases has to do with how thoroughly we embrace the opportunity to consider the alluding text and the text alluded to afresh in light of each other.

Beyond that, we'll always have limitations and biases. Philosopher and Hermeneutics scholar Hans Georg Gadamer stressed that scholars of literature, arts and humanities should not strive to mimic the empiricism of the sciences because the arts don't work that way, and will always transcend the abilities of empiricism to grasp. He also claims that prejudice or bias is unavoidable, and can, in fact, be an asset as well as a shortcoming. But the trick is to be aware of our prejudices so that we might be ready to transcend them: "The important thing is to be aware of one's own bias, so that the text can present itself in all its otherness and thus assert its own truth against one's own fore-meanings [prejudices]."(7)

As Gadamer once noted, Americans are very proud.(8) We are often told that pride is a good thing, but Christianity has taught that it's the worst of the seen deadly sins. Pride can get in the way of admitting our biases and achieving an honest self-awareness. But if we overcome a bit of our pride and improve self-awareness of bias, this allows us to transcend our biases in dialog, perhaps just a bit at a time.



(1) Kaula, David. "Hamlet and the Image of Both Churches." Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 24, no. 2 (1984): 241-55. doi:10.2307/450526.
(2) Greenblatt, Stephen. Hamlet in Purgatory. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013.
(3) Holmes, John. "Rebels of Art and Science: The Empirical Drive of the Pre-Raphaelites." Nature International Journal of Science. October 24, 2018. Accessed March 19, 2019. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-07110-9.
(4)"Intertextuality." Wikipedia. December 28, 2018. Accessed March 19, 2019. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intertextuality.
(5) Alter, Robert. The Art of Biblical Narrative. New York: Basic Books, 2011.
(6) Kawashima, Robert. "Comparative Literature and Biblical Studies: The Case of Allusion." Prooftexts 27, no. 2 (2007): 324-44. doi:10.2979/pft.2007.27.2.324.
(7) Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Truth and Method. Translated by Joel Weisenheimer and Donald Marshall. 2nd ed. New York, NY: Crossroads, 1992: xxi-xxiii, xxxi, 269.
(8) Gadamer said this to me at a college dinner forty years ago when I asked him what he thought of his U.S. visit.