A Good Shakespeare Resource & A Catholic Blind-Spot

MARY JO KIETZMAN's book, The Biblical Covenant in Shakespeare (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018)

To introduce some thoughts on Mary Jo Kietzman's fine book and its good chapter on Hamlet, I need to say a few words about my own relative unfamiliarity with certain books of the Hebrew scriptures, and to do that, some observations about the scripture readings people heard in church in Shakespeare's England, as compared to Catholic churchgoers of the last 50-75 years. Why? Because Kietzman's book helped me realize some gaps in what scripture readings I had internalized during my years growing up Catholic, and later, as a church choir director and liturgist.

REQUIRED BY LAW, OR CATHOLIC "OBLIGATION"?
In Shakespeare's lifetime, Sunday church attendance was required by law, so if one were a law-abiding citizen, one tended to hear the entire Sunday cycle of readings as listed in the Book of Common Prayer.

I was raised Catholic, a strand of Christianity in which there is a Sunday "obligation" to attend mass. The Catholic cycle of readings in my lifetime has been a three-year cycle, but in many ways, the exposure of a Catholic to the readings of scripture in modern times bears many similarities to the experience of people in Shakespeare's lifetime, with a few differences (If I'd been raised in an evangelical household and sent to summer bible camp, or even if my religious education had been more bible-centered, this might have been otherwise):

HEAVY ON CHRISTIAN ("NEW TESTAMENT") SCRIPTURES, LIGHT ON HEBREW (OLD TESTAMENT") SCRIPTURES
The modern schedule of readings for Catholics, collected in a book called the Lectionary, includes for Sundays certain key readings from the Hebrew scriptures (or "Old Testament") that the Catholic church deemed important for Catholics to hear because of complimentary themes and plots. Yet in Shakespeare's lifetime, if one only attended Sunday communion service, one did not hear much from the Hebrew scriptures at all: The first reading was usually from a letter of Paul, and the second always from a gospel.

If one attended morning or evening prayer in Shakespeare's lifetime, one had a much richer diversity of readings that included many selections from the Hebrew scriptures, as well as others from the Christian scriptures (or "New Testament"). This is somewhat analogous to the modern Catholic experience: If one attends daily mass on a weekday, the readings are different and therefore more inclusive than the experience one would have if attending only on Sundays, and if one attended or observed morning and/or evening prayer on a regular basis, the diversity of texts heard or read would increase even more. It could be argued that Bible-reading was perhaps more widespread in Shakespeare's lifetime, since the Bible was only widely available in English during and after the lifetimes of Shakespeare's parents. Hearing and reading the Bible in English instead of Latin was popular then, especially in more devout families.

BLIND SPOTS: LACK OF FAMILIARITY WITH HEBREW SCRIPTURE & ITS STORY PLOTS
So in general, in Shakespeare's lifetime as in our own (for Catholic and mainstream Protestant services), those who only attend one Sunday service tend to hear MORE readings from the gospels and from letters (or "epistles"), usually of Paul, and LESS from the Hebrew scriptures.

This means Catholics and mainstream Protestants often have blind spots when it comes to Hebrew scriptures and their stories. For this reason, for example, I tend to view Hamlet, Horatio and Marcellus' scenes of seeing the ghost together (1.4, 1.5) as a kind of dark transfiguration plot echo, since it sounds to me like Peter, James, and John going up with Jesus, who is transfigured. Since the first scene establishes Horatio as a doubting Thomas figure regarding the ghost, we expect the ghost to be like Jesus, perhaps (or a dark parody), and the three Danes, Hamlet, Horatio, and Marcellus, like Peter, James, and John.

Yet for very excellent reasons, Jewish readers may as quickly view these two scenes not in terms of Jesus' transfiguration, but in terms of Moses going up on the mountain to receive the law (and in fact, the gospel tales of the Transfiguration owe great literary debts to the story of Moses receiving the law, as scholars like Rober Alter [The Art of Biblical Narrative] might remind us). Julia Reinhard Lupton has noted this Moses echo very well, as I have pointed out previously. As with the Moses tale in which Moses goes off alone with God to receive the law on tablets, Hamlet goes off alone with the ghost and says he will wipe clean the "tables" (Tablets?) of his memory and write down to remember only what the ghost has to tell him about avenging the father's murder.

MARY JO KIETZMAN has written an excellent book, The Biblical Covenant in Shakespeare (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) which greatly expands reflection on how Hebrew Scriptures may have influenced Shakespeare, and which contains a good chapter on Hamlet (127-161). For example, she notes that while many angels made promises to the patriarchs, the angel who speaks to Gideon makes no promises (as Hamlet's ghost/apparition makes none), so Gideon tests the angel. The manner of testing is not quite the same as for Hamlet, but for those familiar with the Gideon tale, Hamlet's testing of the ghost and of his uncle's (and mother's) conscience might be viewed through the lens of this biblical precedent.

This brings to mind an important distinction:
When scholars speak of biblical allusions in Hamlet, many speak relatively exclusively regarding biblical names that are mentioned (Baptista, Jephthah, Cain) and phrases that can be matched with bible quotes ("Let be"). I often prefer to include biblical plot echoes that are often much less explicit (Jonah, or Emmaus), but very much present.

Yet another aspect of biblical influences on and through Shakespeare is even more subtle than these and consists of how early audience familiarity with scripture stories created precedents as lenses through which they viewed the events of the play. For me, Gideon's trumpets and experience of the angel would fall into this sort of category.

Kietzman also notes the story of Jael stealthily killing Sisera with a tent stake through the temple while Sisera sleeps, with possible connections to the poison in the ear of King Hamlet, and perhaps (with a Freudian stretch) Hamlet going to his Mother's closet. The various implications of these echoes still have to be worked out: For example, if the dead King Hamlet was a kind of Sisera-figure, and Claudius then a kind of Jael figure for killing him with stealth, then this causes some cognitive dissonance because we're told to assume the dead king was good, and that Claudius was wrong to murder his brother, marry his wife, and usurp his throne. If the Jael-Sisera echo applies to Claudius and the dead King Hamlet, then it might be ironic, implying a corruption in Denmark of the biblical ideal, or a parody of the scriptural echo, with Claudius equated with a feminine Jael and savior for killing an evil figure (?).

The chapter notes that, during the time of Judges, there was a sense of disarray and discord due to people forgetting the covenant of God, and Kietzman compares this to the "unweeded garden" of Denmark, as well as the general tendency to forget in the Danish court. This was an interesting and fresh perspective for me, in part because of how, during my years as a choir director and liturgist, hymnody and limited familiarity with the stories in Judges had shaped by assumptions. One such hymn text was by Thomas H. Troeger and spoke of the transition from judges to kings in the life of Israel, as well as of David's plan to build a new temple.

Before the temple's great stone sill was quarried, smoothed and squared,
a dreaming prophet glimpsed God's will and heaven's word declared:
"Our tenting Lord who guides and calls has never sought a home.
God will not be enclosed by walls; God wants to move and roam."

These are verses 1 & 2 of a 5-verse hymn by Troeger (from New Hymns for the Lectionary to Glorify the Maker's Name, Oxford University Press, 1986).

The general way that these hymn-lines influenced my assumptions was to imply that the age of Judges was better, and perhaps the people of Israel had a greater sense of a transcendent God who "tented" with them, who moved and roamed with them, as compared to some of the compromises and changes that came with kings and their various corruptions.

Yet this was generally a false assumption on my part: While the hymn text is beautiful and conveys good insights about the transcendent God described, the "good old days" were usually not so good as sentimental nostalgia would have us believe.

So in general, I would highly recommend Mary Jo Krietzman's book, The Biblical Covenant in Shakespeare, from Palgrave-Macmillan. It is at times a bit more Freudian than I would like: As I have said in the past, it seems to me that Hamlet has more of a King David complex than an Oedipal complex, and I tend to agree with Tamara Hammond that Freudian assumptions in the interpretation of the Oedipus story need to be reexamined. *

But these are minor issues; the book is rich and helpful.

~~~~~
* See Tamara Hammond's article here.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Thanks for reading!
My current project is a book tentatively titled “Hamlet’s Bible,” about biblical allusions and plot echoes in Hamlet.

Below is a link to a list of some of my top posts (“greatest hits”), including a description of my book project (last item on the list):

https://pauladrianfried.blogspot.com/2019/12/top-20-hamlet-bible-posts.html

I post every week, so please visit as often as you like and consider subscribing.