Crime and God's Judgment in Shakespeare

Robert Rentoul ReedJr., Robert Rentoul Reed Jr.

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9780813154503
• eBook ISBN:
  9780813186542
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

NOTES

INTRODUCTION

1. David L. Frey, The First Tetralogy: Shakespeare’s Scrutiny of the Tudor Myth (The Hague and Paris, 1976), p. 10.

2. All quotations from Shakespeare’s plays in my introduction (and throughout) are from Peter Alexander, ed., Shakespeare: The Complete Works (New York, 1952).

3. Michael Quinn, “Providence in Shakespeare’s Yorkist Plays,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 10 (1959), p. 50.

4. Ibid.

5. Wilbur Sanders, The Dramatist and the Received Idea (Cambridge, 1968), p. 94.

6. Moody E. Prior, The Drama of Power: Studies in Shakespeare’s History Plays (Evanston, Ill., 1973), p. 49.

7. See Lloyd Berry, “Introduction,” The Geneva Bible (1560), facs. (Madison, Wisc., 1969), for an estimate of the number of editions printed between 1560 (first edition) and 1603. Until 1575, editions were printed in Geneva and were shipped to England. From 1575 to 1618, the Bodley Press in England issued “at least one new edition of the Geneva Bible . . . each year” (p. 14).

8. Several Elizabethan writers stress the principle that the magistrate (whether the king, the local or itinerant judge, or the hangman) was responsible principally to God. Among them, John Norden wrote: “God himselfe . . . will revenge it [a violation against authority], and the magistrate hath power from him to punish it” (The Mirror of Honor [London, 1597], p. 39). Edward Coke, attorney general of England during the last decade of Elizabeth’s reign, was to state categorically in his Institutes: “Revenge belongeth [only] to the magistrate, who is Gods lieutenant” (The Third Part of the Institutes of the Laws of England, written ca. 1620-1630 [London, 1797], p. 157). Mary B. Mroz, whose study of late medieval and Renaissance principles of God’s judgment upon human transgression is unusual in its thoroughness, sums up the Elizabethan view of the God/ magistrate relationship: “Public magistrates . . . are recognized as the foremost human agents of divine vengeance” (Divine Vengeance [Washington, D.C., 1941], p. 48).

9. Regarding God’s right and willingness to abrogate the divine right of an intractable king and to sanction his removal from office, see R.R. Reed, Jr., Richard II: From Mask to Prophet (University Park, Pa., 1968), pp. 22-31, especially pp. 26-30.

10. A.L. French, “The World of Richard III,” Shakespeare Studies, 4 (1968), p. 36.

11. Sanders, p. 107.

12. French, p. 37.

13. Fictitious.

14. Sanders, p. 93.

15. William Perkins, A Discourse of Conscience (1596), ed. Thomas F. Merrill (Nieuwkoop, Netherlands, 1966), p. 10.

16. Timothy Bright, A Treatise of Melancholie (1586), reprint ed. (New York, 1940), p. 185.

ONE: Shakespeare’s Eight-Part Epic

1. Henry A. Kelly, Divine Providence in the England of Shakespeare’s Histories (Cambridge, Mass., 1970), p. 39.

2. Kelly, p. 40, quoted from The Chronicles of John Hardyng (ca. 1465), ed. Sir Henry Ellis (London, 1812), p. 18. Kelly modernizes the spelling of all old texts. In a passage referring specifically to the Lancastrian curse of inherited guilt and its origin, Hardyng has written:

For when Henry the fourth first was cround,

Many a wyseman sayd full commenly,

The third heyre shuld not ioyse, but be uncround,

And deposed of all regalitie.

[Hardyng, p. 18]

3. Kelly, pp. 40-41. Quoted from John de Waurin, Recueil des chroniques/... de la Grant Bretaigne (ca. 1447), ed. Sir William Hardy and Edward Hardy, 5 vols. (1-4: London, 1884; 5:London, 1891), 2:393-94.

4. Kelly, p. 50. Quoted from A Political Retrospect, ed. Thomas Wright in Political Poems (London, 1861), pp. 267-69. The ancient author of this piece on the third heir is anonymous.

5. All biblical quotations are from the Geneva Bible (1560), the most widely circulated version in Elizabethan England. Between 1560 and 1611, it appeared in more than one hundred editions.

6. Kelly, p. 96. Quoted and translated from Polydore Vergil, Anglica historia (Basel, 1534), pp. 514-15.

7. Kelly, p. 126.

8. Edward Hall, The Union of The Two Noble and Illustre Famelies of Lancastre & Yorke (1548), reprint (London, 1809), p. 35. Quoted, the spelling having been modernized, by Kelly, p. 115.

9. Kelly, p. 117.

10. Ibid., p. 137.

11. Hall, pp. 245-48; see, in particular, pp. 246-47. For a shorter version, with spelling modernized, see Kelly, pp. 121-24.

12. Raphael Holinshed, Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland, 2nd ed. (London, 1587), reprint ed., 6 vols. (London, 1808), 3:325. Quoted and spelling modernized by Kelly, p. 152.

13. Holinshed, 2:869.

14. Ibid., 3:24.

15. Kelly, p. 143.

16. John Donne, The Sermons of John Donne, ed. George R. Potter and Evelyn M. Simpson, 9 vols. (Berkeley, 1957), 3:284.

17. Hall, p. 292.

18. Holinshed, 3:448 (misnumbered 478).

19. Robert B. Pierce, Shakespeare...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• One: The Structure of Shakespeare’s Eight-Part Epic
• Two: The Justice of God: Medieval and Renaissance
• Three: Thomas of Gloucester: The Sword of Retribution
• Four: Richard II and the Delay of Providence
• FIVE: The Later Gloucesters: Humphrey and Richard
• Six: Prince Hamlet and the Double Mission
• Seven: Macbeth, the Devil, and God
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Index