Shakespeare and Abraham

Ken Jackson

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780268083557
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism of Shakespeare
• Index: Literature

In Shakespeare and Abraham, Ken Jackson illuminates William Shakespeare's dramatic fascination with the story of Abraham's near sacrifice of his son Isaac in Genesis 22. Themes of child killing fill Shakespeare's early plays: Genesis 22 informed Clifford's attack on young Rutland in 3 Henry 6, Hubert's providentially thwarted murder of Arthur in King John, and Aaron the Moor's surprising decision to spare his son amidst the filial slaughters of Titus Andronicus, among others.

However, the playwright's full engagement with the biblical narrative does not manifest itself exclusively in scenes involving the sacrifice of children or in verbal borrowings from the famously sparse story of Abraham. Jackson argues that the most important influence of Genesis 22 and its interpretive tradition is to be found in the conceptual framework that Shakespeare develops to explore relationships among ideas of religion, sovereignty, law, and justice. Jackson probes the Shakespearean texts from the vantage of modern theology and critical theory, while also orienting them toward the traditions concerning Abraham in Jewish, Pauline, patristic, medieval, and Reformation sources and early English drama. Consequently, the playwright's "Abrahamic explorations" become strikingly apparent in unexpected places such as the "trial" of Shylock in The Merchant of Venice and the bifurcated structure of Timon of Athens. By situating Shakespeare in a complex genealogy that extends from ancient religion to postmodern philosophy, Jackson inserts Shakespeare into the larger contemporary conversation about religion in the modern world.

CHAPTER 1

THE WAKEFIELD CYCLE PLAY AND THE INTERPRETIVE TRADITION

As critics of medieval drama routinely noted throughout the twentieth century, the Towneley cycle play of Abraham and Isaac is strikingly different from the dramatizations of Genesis 22 found in the York and Chester cycles, or the N-Town play, or the separate, non-cycle plays from Brome Manor and the Northampton version (formerly known as the Dublin play) and the Abraham segment in the Cornish Ordinalia.1 The most crucial distinction? The Towneley Abraham never confesses to Isaac that God has called for the killing. The Towneley cycle also differs on this point from the late medieval world’s most intellectually sophisticated dramatic treatment, Theodore de Beze’s Abraham Sacrifiant, a well-known Italian treatment of the subject, Feo Belcari’s La rappresantazione d’Abram e d’Isaac suo figliuolo, and a lengthy Cretan play.2

In every comparable play Abraham reveals to Isaac God’s demand, and this mitigates the anxiety for Abraham, Isaac, and audiences. According to V. A. Kolve and Rosemary Woolf, in the Brome play, the “finest” and “best” of the Abraham plays, the dramatic tension eases when Abraham confides to Isaac:

Isaac. Ist it Godes will that I should be slain?

Abraham. Yea, truly, Isaac, my son so good,

And therefore my handes I wring.

Isaac. Now, father, against my Lordes will

I will never grutch loud nor still:

He might have sent me a better destiny

If it had been his pleasure.3

The York, Chester, N-Town, and Northampton Isaac, provided with the knowledge of God’s will, all take on the serenity of a heroic, willing, self-sacrificing Christ-like figure. Consequently, each play provides some emotional relief to the horror of a confused, terrified, and grotesquely betrayed child. In the York version, the one play that casts Isaac as a grown, thirty-three-year-old Christ-like man, father and son work in concert. The adult Isaac, self-conscious of his own strength under such a threat, advises the aging Abraham on how he should be bound:

I know myself, by course of kind,

My flesh for death wil be dread and—

I am feared that you shall find

My force your forward to withstand—

Therefore is best that you me bind

In handes fast, both foot and hand,

Now, whiles I am in might and mind.

So shall you safely make offer and,

For, father, when I am bound,

My might may not avail:

Here shall no fault be found

To make your forward fail.

For you are old and all unwieldy,

And I am wight and wild of thought.4

Most of the cycle plays provide some comparable corresponding narrative to the illustration of the scene, like the one depicted in the Hampton Court tapestry, which shows the story ending with Abraham and Isaac joined in prayer. (See Figure 1 in the Introduction.)

The Chester play provides a Christian typological epilogue explicitly reminding audiences that the terrible scene points to God’s sacrifice of his own son.

Lordinges, this signification

Of this deed of devotion,

And you will you wit mon,

May turn you to much good.

This deed that you see done in this place,

In example of Jesu done it was,

That, for to win mankind grace,

Was sacrificed on the rood.

By Abraham I may understand

The father of heaven that can fand,

With his blood, to break that bond

The Devil had brought us to.

By Isaac understand I may

Jesu that was obedient ay,

His fathers will to work always,

His death to underfong.5

All this is not to suggest that these plays do not generate pathos. As Kolve says, referring to the Brome and the Northampton specifically,

these versions are alike in their respect for human love, and in dramatizing a test designed to prove that Abraham’s love for God is greater than his love for his son, the medieval drama achieves its moment of greatest pathos—greater even than that associated with the death of Christ, for we can feel and understand the redemptive necessity of that later death. Neither Abraham nor Isaac can understand the necessity of the command that is given to them. They only know it must be obeyed.6

My initial point here, again, is to reemphasize what many critics have already noted: the Towneley is very different. The Towneley Abraham not only does not tell Isaac the reason for the trip, he lies to Isaac before leaving home: “My dear son, look thou have no dread, / We shall come home with great loving.” He adds, “We shall make mirth and great solace.” When Abraham does tell Isaac, he does not explain his actions as God’s will: “But certainly thou now must die, / If my purpose hold but true.” Consequently, the Towneley Isaac’s pleadings are not the rational, controlled, and moving speeches of the Brome, but wild, emotional cries: “Ah, father, mercy! Mercy!” Isaac says he will cooperate but his stage actions belie this: “Be still!” Abraham cries, “Lie still!” Isaac repeatedly asks “What I have done?” while crying for mercy. The boy pleads continuously for his life, physically resisting his father. At the critical moment, Abraham attacks Isaac as a crazed murderer rather than as a religious actor: “I must rush on him my pain to ease / And slay him here right as he lies.”

Martin Stevens, in Four Middle English Cycle Plays, has argued that the “Wakefield Master” (who may or may not have had a hand in the Abraham play) consistently blurred the common, everyday, and often ugly with the divine. He notes, for example, that the Towneley/Wakefield version of the Cain and Abel story is called The Murder of Abel (Mactatio Abel), not, as elsewhere, the “sacrifice of Abel.” “The emphasis,” he says, “is on murder.”7 This potentially ugly turn to the real marks the Towneley Abraham and Isaac. An angel has to literally wrestle Abraham to the ground. “Who is there now?” Abraham demands, apparently attempting to fight the angel off: “Ware! Let thee go!” After the angel finally stays Abraham’s hand, Isaac remains shaken, confused, and uncertain: “But, father, shall I not be slain?” and “Is all forgein?” Nothing in the play mitigates the horror of the moment.

This is true even though the manuscript of the Towneley Abraham and Isaac play we have is incomplete. The last two folios are missing, so the play concludes with these lines:

Isaac. Is all forgein?

Abraham. Yea! Son, certain.

Isaac. For feard, sir, was I nearhand mad.8

One could argue that the play’s distinctiveness may have been originally tempered by a few more lines wherein Abraham explains his silence. Donna Smith Vinter speculates that we “would have found father and son worshipping together.”9 It is difficult to imagine, however, what sort of after-the-fact explication could have made sense of the deeply troubling scene just displayed.

Even the God who sends the angel to stop Abraham seems unnerved, uncertain of his own power to prevent the killing he ordered:

Angel, hie with all thy main!

To Abraham thou shalt be sent.

Say, Isaac shall not be slain—

He shall live and not be burnt.

My bidding standes he not again.

Go, put him out of his intent!

Bid him go home again,

I know how well he meant.10

Abraham turns away from the angel of the Lord at the end in an attempt to reconcile with his terrified son: “To speke with the have I no space, / with my dere son till I have spokyn.” Finding a typological rationale for this would be difficult. To borrow a term from John Caputo we might describe this God of the Towneley Abraham as “weak,” a God with surprisingly limited power.11

The unrelenting intensity of the Towneley Abraham and Isaac play has prompted twentieth-century scholarship to describe the play as “naturalistic” and “psychological” rather than religious.12 This particular Abraham and Isaac play, it has been argued repeatedly, points forward to the secular modern world, either accidentally or intentionally, clumsily or artfully. Most critics see the absence of Christian typology as the result of a secular impulse, either artistic or ethical. The near chaotic horror tends to be read either as an attempt to make the play more exciting than the supposedly predictable and ritualized, typological religious drama, or an acknowledgement on the part of a more modern-thinking playwright that Abraham may be simply crazed. For these critics, the story centers on the tension it depicts between inscrutable divine law and rational human ethics.

Medieval dramatic criticism has thus been working within the wake of the supposedly outdated “secularization hypothesis” of early English drama, the influential notion that some evolutionary process took place wherein primitive, ritualistic, religious performances developed into sophisticated, representational, and secular drama. I point this out not to begin an indictment of medieval dramatic criticism. In fact, I find much of this secularization criticism on point. What I am trying to do here is begin describing a pressing literary critical trap. On the one hand, the scholarly suggestion that a medieval cycle drama about Genesis 22 actually turns away from religion is clearly a case of the secularization hypothesis operating at its most absurd. This play must be, in some sense, religious. On the other hand, much of what criticism has said of the play’s seemingly secular direction rings true—even to a religiously minded critic.

The Towneley Abraham and Isaac and its critical reception, then, illuminates the general state of our current literary critical thought relative to religion and the secularization hypothesis. While no serious scholar would argue for the secularization hypothesis, no one has put forward a persuasive alternative for understanding the relationship of religion to the development of early English dramatic texts. The secularization hypothesis may be unsatisfactory, but its narrative still organizes discussions. As Lawrence M. Clopper puts it, “Remarkable as the rethinking of early drama has been, we continue to use schemes of organizing material in our histories that imply the theories that we dismiss.”13

Early English dramatic criticism still lacks even a basic grammar for talking about a religiousness that seemingly exceeds its cultural or historical moment, especially when that religiousness presses close to anything like what we critics consider the secular or modern. Sarah Beckwith’s Signifying God: Social Relation and Symbolic Act in the York Corpus Christi Plays is a notable exception.14 We still tend to rely on rather common Enlightenment divides to ground our discussions: if not religious, a play must therefore be secular, or moving in the direction of the secular-modern. The need for a more refined instrument in early English dramatic criticism is especially acute given the fact that reconfiguring the traditionally understood break between the religious and the secular as determined by Enlightenment thought has been a primary occupation of leading intellectuals and, correspondingly, there is a growing, general geopolitical awareness that the divide between the secular and religious is not as distinct as it was generally considered to be in the mid and late twentieth century. It is becoming clear, for example, that the very notion of the “secular” is inextricably linked to a certain development of Western Christianity and therefore, understood in its current form, limited in its usefulness.15 In brief, early English dramatic criticism would benefit greatly from a sustained engagement with these broader conversations.16

In early modern literary studies, for example, Graham Hammill and Julia Reinhard Lupton sketched a broad outline that may help begin organizing these critical discussions. “Religion,” they argue, almost as if addressing specifically the Towneley Abraham and Isaac play and its rather stunning break with Christian typology, “is not fully reducible to culture.” Instead, religion can be thought of as

a reservoir of foundational stories, tropes, exegetical habits that structure and give shape to political institutions and literary forms in ways that occur in culture—in specific spatio-temporal moments—while also manifesting a shaping power not fully reflective of the historical settings in which they are exercised. . . . Like ghosts or viruses, religions leap across groups and epochs, practicing cultural accommodation in order to outlive rather than support the contexts that frame them. Religions survive when they manage to install elements of thought that stand out from the very rituals and practices designed to transmit but also neutralize them.17

The Towneley Abraham and Isaac functions as a host for religion as Hammill and Lupton describe it.

More specifically, the playwright of the Towneley Abraham and Isaac taps into the particularly deep reservoir of stories, tropes, and exegetical habits surrounding Genesis 22. The Towneley play may be distinctive within the generic boundaries of medieval drama, but it fits well within a broader category: the long and complex history of interpretations of Genesis 22 dating from the early Jewish commentary (Jubilees, 4 Maccabees, Pseudo-Philo, Josephus, etc.), to the Jewish/ Hellenic moment of Philo, to St. Paul’s use of Abraham, to the Early Church Fathers (Tertullian, Origen, St. Augustine, etc.), to the Koran and Islamic exegesis, to medieval Christian commentary (Bede, Anglo-Saxon poetry, Aquinas, etc.), to Luther and Calvin, to the continental philosophers Kant and Hegel, and Kierkegaard’s remarkable Fear and Trembling—all the way up until our current moment and Derrida’s recent reconsideration of Kierkegaard and Genesis 22 in The Gift of Death. Like these texts, the Towneley play rigorously and powerfully explores the complexity and terror of Genesis 22.

In so doing, the Towneley Abraham and Isaac (as I will argue about much of Shakespeare) presses very close to what Derrida calls a “religion without religion,” a messianic openness to something altogether other, an openness that determines the traditional Abrahamic faiths while ...