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 th...