Covenant is a theopolitical idea central to biblical narrative that became the cornerstone of the Protestant Reformation. The covenant idea enabled the creation of a new theology that identified relationality as the core of our human nature.¹ Covenant theology focused on faith in God’s promises and provided a pattern for human living within new communities grounded on an engagement with the Word and an identification with the chosen people of the Bible—the patriarchs and the nation of Israel.² The covenants of the Bible are the founding covenants of Western civilization, initiated when God calls a chosen individual and makes metaphorical promises of more or better life. If the chosen individual hearkens to His voice, a relationship is formed, characterized by “reciprocal consideration and commitment, given for the flourishing of the other.”³ Covenants begin with calls, not commands. Grounded as they are in moral commitment, the chosen individual must be free to respond, and free response is encouraged throughout the unfolding relationship, even to the point of argument and physical struggle. Jacob is given the name that becomes the nation, Israel, after wrestling with God: “Thy name shall be called Jacob no more, but Israel: because thou hast had power with God, thou shalt also prevail with men” (Gen. 32:28).

As Jacob ’s renaming suggests, personal identity reformed through covenantal commitments becomes the basis for corporate identity. Part of what made covenant such a potentially revolutionary social formation in sixteenth-century Europe was that it is not hierarchical—not a relationship where a superior commands obedience. Instead, covenant is a bilateral partnership in which the reciprocal speech and action of the participants create a relationship, a family, a fraternity, a nation, and even a play. Because covenants between God and man must be expressed through binding pacts between persons, Reformation covenant theology bred new kinds of political communities (congregational republics) and contained the seeds of secularism, providing a relatively smooth transition into modern theories of social contract.⁴ Craig Muldrew argues in The Economy of Obligation that covenant theology, with its emphasis on interpersonal trust, provided the ethical foundation for the collective understanding of credit, neighborliness, and commerce.⁵ And historians acknowledge that covenant was central to the political reforms Parliament instigated when, in 1641, they passed the Protestation Oath —the “first national covenant against popery and arbitrary government”—followed by the Solemn League and Covenant on June 22, 1643. My claim for Shakespeare’s work is that the content and form of his dramas popularized and spread the covenant idea. By seeding the plays with allusions to biblical covenant stories, Shakespeare not only lends ethical weight to secular lives but develops covenant as the core idea in a civil religion or a founding myth of the early modern political community, writ small (family and friendship) and large (business and state).

When Henry VIII broke with the Roman Catholic mother church, he created an opening for covenantal religion—an emergent cultural form preached by divines like William Tyndale —to challenge the ideology of Rome. Jonathan Dollimore is certainly right to argue that a heightened awareness of religion as ideological practice—devised “to hold men’s minds in greater subjection”—was characteristic of the early modern period but wrong to suggest that Reformers merely replaced one ideological system with another.⁶ The Reformation stress on the individual’s encounter with God’s covenant promises in Scripture, despite the potential danger of oppressive literalism and bibliolatry, gave individuals an authoritative text that encouraged them to strive for an alternative, more egalitarian way of existing in the world against whatever blocking powers there might be.⁷ This was clearly not Henry Tudor’s intention but a repercussion of his own subversive act that birthed a civil religious tradition.

Following Robert Bellah, who explained the importance of the Israelite narrative to the experience of Puritan immigrants to New England, I understand “civil religion” as the religious dimension of the political realm or a founding myth for the community.⁸ For English Protestants in the sixteenth century—along with co-religionists in Geneva, Zurich, the Dutch republic, and later Scotland and New England—the Hebraic idiom, with covenant as its core concept, expressed the early modern nationalist ideal of being an elect nation.⁹ The founding myth was, of course, the biblical story of Israel’s deliverance from captivity in Egypt into a covenant relationship with God that offered a framework for a religion purified of idolatry and a nation moving toward the promised land.¹⁰ The playwright John Bale put the break with Rome in a longer historical narrative that lauded King John (who stood up to Pope Innocent III) as “a faythfull Moyses” who “withstode proude Pharao for hys poore Israel” and guided his “poore people … in the desart” until Henry VIII, compared with “that duke Josue,” brought us into “the lande of mylke and honye.”¹¹ But the Canaan Bale envisioned disappeared like a mirage, following the reigns of Henry and his son Edward, and the Reformation progressed through a series of crises: Mary returned England to Catholicism and sent hundreds of committed Protestants into exile or to the stake. Elizabeth was excommunicated and Spanish galleons sailed up the channel to threaten little England just as the Philistine giant, Goliath threatened David. Each crisis galvanized the mythic machinery that transformed threat into opportunity for moral reformation, deliverance, and the renewal of covenant. For example, some of the Marian exiles, who adopted the personae of Old Testament prophets, wrote revolutionary tracts, and others translated and compiled the Geneva Bible with its title-page woodcut showing the Israelites assembled on the shore of the Red Sea, trusting in the Lord to deliver them. The exiles came home from across the water when Elizabeth I was crowned, to judge Israel, as Debora did, and to rule, like the idealized Davidic ruler of the Hebrew Bible, by restoring the true worship of God and facing down the threat (or lure) of Catholicism.¹² Even the threats posed by Catholic conspiracies moved Elizabeth’s ministers to propose an early form of the national covenant: the 1584 Bond of Association committed subjects to protect the life of the monarch and defined loyalty in confessional terms, making obedience to the monarch “conditional on his or her readiness to defend the faith.”¹³

When Shakespeare wrote the history of the Tudors in the second Henriad, he relied on the history of Israel’s first kings and a strand of covenantalism influenced by continental Reformers like Philippe de Mornay and Johannes Althusius, who explored the ramifications of covenantalism on politics. In their federalist tracts (“federal” derived from the Latin word for covenant, foedus), these thinkers justified resistance to tyrants, argued for popular sovereignty, and established the moral order on covenant, functioning through representative government and systems of checks and balances.¹⁴ In the Henriad, federalism , arguably, underwrites Henry Bullingbrook’s seizure of the crown from the reigning King Richard II. When Bullingbrook returns from exile and accepts the armed support of Northumberland and Harry Percy, he promises to reciprocate their favors “as [his] fortune ripens” (2.3.48).¹⁵ Shakespeare is explicit about the nature of the relationship Bullingbrook forms with his new allies: “My heart this covenant makes, my hand thus seals it” (2.3.50). Richard is deposed and sent to the Tower, and Bullingbrook speaks the ambiguous words that cause his execution. The assassination of Richard is justified by Calvinist resistance theory: Richard is, after all, a tyrant, and Bullingbrook, who has something like a popular mandate, is at least partly motivated by the good of the commonwealth. Although the guilt incurred with regicide may contribute to the personal sickness of Bullingbrook when he becomes King Henry IV, the clear cause of sickness in the body politic (symptomized by civil war) is the breach of Henry’s covenant with the Percy family. England only returns to health in Henry V when Shakespeare represents a king who effectively leads his “band of brothers” to victory in France by giving every soldier a stake in the fight and when a Chorus extends that fellowship, by enlisting the theater audience in the making of “imaginary puissance.” The nation comes into being through the bond between actors and audience.¹⁶

Because covenant is a theopolitical idea , when we see how central it is to Shakespeare’s plays and his dramaturgy, the false dichotomy critics posit when they insist his drama is either secular (a “place where people congregated to create a public sphere”) or sacred (“the first truly Reformed church”) is resolved at the point of connection between vertical and horizontal axes that figure the commitments that orient the human moral life.¹⁷ To live covenantally is to live in a radically unstable, truly dramatic, relationship to an Other (a “Thou,” in Martin Buber’s famous formulation ) that issues life-disrupting calls and life-energizing promises. The Other is transcendent divine, neighbor, and even the Other lurking within ...