Beatrice Groves - Texts and Traditions - Religion in Shakespeare 1592-1604 (Oxford English Monographs) (2007)

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Texts and Traditions
Religion in Shakespeare 1592–1604
B E AT R I C E G ROV E S
CLARENDON PRESS · OXFORD

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For my husband
Preface
In the late seventeenth century Richard Davies, Archdeacon of Coventry,

claimed that Shakespeare had created the character of ‘Justice Clodpate’
in order to satirize ‘Sr Lucy’ who had had him whipped for poaching.
Davies also stated that Shakespeare ‘dyed a papist’. The Archdeacon’s
unreliability as a witness (his inability to distinguish between Justice
Shallow and a character created by Shadwell over three-quarters of a
century later) is one example of the difficulties that bedevil any attempt
to prove Shakespeare’s Catholicism. Nonetheless the idea has found its
advocates since the Victorian period, and has recently become one of
the most popular and hotly contested areas of Shakespeare studies. Peter
Milward, E. A. J. Honigmann, Richard Wilson, Stephen Greenblatt,
and Clare Asquith are among those who have lately suggested that
Shakespeare’s own beliefs underlie his trademark ambiguity of tone and
the romance world of chantry chapels and wayside crosses inhabited by
many of his characters.
This book, however, attempts to engage with the religious nuances in
Shakespeare’s plays in a less sectarian manner. Shakespeare’s dramaturgy
includes traces of Catholicism’s visual emphasis but it also embraces
the rich verbal stimulus of Protestantism’s focus on the Word. This
book is entitled Texts and Traditions because it argues that Shakespeare
enriched his plays through appropriating both the linguistic wealth of
the English Bible and the theatrical splendour of liturgy, images, and
mystery plays from England’s recent Catholic past. Rather than find
the clue to these appropriations in his own biography, this monograph
aims to articulate the way that Shakespeare’s verbally sophisticated,
embodied drama engaged with the religious culture in which both he
and his works were embedded; a culture which, as recent historical
research has suggested, assimilated rather than destroyed much of its
Catholic past. This less confessional approach enables a focus which is
not directed at Shakespeare’s beliefs but at the interpretative possibilities
that his engagement with religious culture opens up within his plays.
This work grew out of an Oxford D.Phil. and I would like to
thank my supervisors Peter McCullough and Emma Smith, for their
viii Preface
encouragement, advice, and friendship, for which I am ever indebted.
My gratitude is also owed for the generosity of my grandmother Phil
who gave me a place in her home in which to study. I would also like
to thank all those who have taught and inspired me, foremost among
whom is my mother Jane, who first fed my love for Shakespeare, and
took me to see his plays. A great debt of gratitude goes also to my
undergraduate tutors: Jeremy Maule, Adrian Poole, Anne Barton, Bart
van Es, Phil West, and, above all, Eric Griffiths.
I have been amazed, throughout the time spent working on this pro-
ject, by the generosity I have encountered. I have found both strangers
and friends content to give up their time and eager to share their expert-
ise. I particularly want to thank Pascale Aebischer, Philippa Berry, Santha
Bhattacharji, Imogen Black, Jeremy Boulton, Henry Chadwick, Helen
Cooper, Helen Deeming, Sarah Dewar-Watson, Katherine Duncan-
Jones, Trevor Griffiths, Helen Hackett, Ralph Hanna, Lorna Huett,
Martin Ingram, Felicity James, Karen Junod, Laurie Maguire, Diarmaid
MacCulloch, Stephen Medcalf, Llewelyn Morgan, John Muddiman,
David Norbrook, Adrian Paterson, Benjamin Prance, Alison Shell, and
Jenny Wormald. I am grateful to the Arts and Humanities Research
Council for the award of a scholarship which enabled me to write my
D.Phil. and to St John’s College, Oxford, for my time there as a gradu-
ate student. In particular I would like to thank the fellows of Wolfson
College, Oxford, whose award of a Junior Research Fellowship enabled
me to complete this book. I am grateful to the many librarians who
have been unfailingly helpful during my research, in particular those
of the Duke Humphrey and Upper Reading Room of the Bodleian.
Thanks are also due to the staff of the Oxford English Faculty library,
the British Library, the Cambridge University Library, and numerous
college libraries.
The chapter on the second tetralogy first appeared in a slightly
different form in Shakespeare Survey as ‘Hal as Self-Styled Redeemer:
The Harrowing of Hell and Henry IV Part 1’ Shakespeare Survey 57
(2004): 236–48. My thanks to Peter Holland and Cambridge University
Press for allowing its inclusion here. I am grateful to Tom Perridge and
all the staff at Oxford University Press involved in the publication of this
monograph, and in particular for the helpful advice of their anonymous
readers.
Preface ix
I wish to thank my parents, all my family, and Alan and Dorothy
Groves for their love, kindness, and support. Finally, this book is
dedicated to my husband, Peter, in love and gratitude for all that he has
given me in the years of its writing.
B.L.R.G.
Contents
Introduction 1
1. Drama and the Word: The Bible on the Early Modern
Stage 10
2. Shakespeare’s Incarnational Aesthetic: The Mystery Plays
and Catholicism 26
3. Comedic Form and Paschal Motif in the First and Second
Quartos of Romeo and Juliet 60
4. ‘I am not he shall buyld the Lord a house’: Religious
Imagery and the Succession to the English Throne in King
John 89
5. ‘Covering discretion with a coat of folly’: The Redemptive
Self-Fashioning of Hal 121
6. ‘Usurp the beggary he was never born to’: Measure for
Measure and the Questioning of Divine Kingship 154
Conclusion 184
Bibliography 189
Index 223
Introduction
I wonder who
Will be the last, the very last, to seek
This place for what it was; one of the crew
That tap and jot and know what rood-lofts were?
(Philip Larkin, ‘Church Going’)
To Larkin, in 1954, rood-lofts (carved wooden balconies which sur-

mounted the rood screen and supported the rood) have become the
epitome of arcane church furniture which only a ‘ruin-bibber, randy
for antique’ would be able to describe. This is because, with their vast
Crucifixion scenes and physical connection with the division of clergy
and laity, they became the focus of Reformation iconoclasm. They were
destroyed during the Edwardian purges of 1547 and 1548, but rebuilt
under Mary. In the early years of Elizabeth’s reign they became the
subject of the most determined struggles between reformers and parish
officials, although, as Henry Machyn records in his diary, by 1560
the battle seemed won: ‘the ij yere of the quen Elesabeth was alle the
rod-loftes taken down in London, and wrytynges wrytyne in the sam
plase’.¹ The Royal Order of 10 October 1561 stated: ‘it is thus decreed
and ordained, that the rood-lofts … be quite taken down unto the upper
part of the vaults, and beam running in length over the said vaults, by
putting some convenient crest upon the said beam’.² John Shakespeare,
¹ Ronald Hutton, The Rise and Fall of Merry England: The Ritual Year 1400–1700
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 81–2, 96, 108–9; The Diary of Henry Machyn,
Citizen and Merchant Taylor of London, From A.D. 1550 to A.D. 1563, ed. John Gough
Nichols (London: The Camden Society, 1848), 241. However, rood-lofts did remain
up to the 1580s in some outlying parishes in Lancashire and Essex: Alexandra Walsham,
Church Papists: Catholicism, Conformity and Confessional Polemic in Early Modern England
(Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 1999), 15.
² Walter Howard Frere, ed., Visitation Articles and Injunctions of the Period of the
Reformation (London: Longmans, Green, 1910), iii. 108.
2 Introduction
acting as Chamberlain of Stratford, oversaw the dismantling of the rood
as well as the white washing of the wall paintings in the Stratford Guild
chapel in 1564.³
Memory, however, cannot be destroyed in the same way as objects,
despite the implicit aim to whitewash minds as well as walls in the
Edwardian Injunctions of 1547, which ordered that ‘monuments of
idolatry’ should all be destroyed ‘so that there remain no memory of
the same in walls, glass-windows, or elsewhere’.⁴ Rood-lofts were almost
entirely destroyed, although their ghost remained, and still remains,
visible in the fabric of some churches in the rood-loft stairs that lead
nowhere. One rood-loft which did survive (in King’s College chapel)
was fitted up to accommodate the queen in a strikingly appropriative
gesture: ‘a fayr closet glased towardes the Queen was devised and made
in ye mydle of the Rode lofte yf ye Quenes maiestie perhaps would there
repose herselfe’.⁵
In Sir Thomas More (1593) a rood-loft carries instead the eponymous
hero, a rebellious Catholic:
Methought I saw him here in Chelsea church,
Standing upon the rood loft, now defaced,
And whilst he kneeled and prayed before the image,
It fell with him into the upper choir,
Where my poor father lay all stained in blood.⁶
For this writer, unlike for Larkin, rood-lofts are not part of an unre-
coverably distant and dreamlike past, but powerful enough to haunt
dreams.
Anthony Munday, who, despite his apparently ardent Protestantism,
had a profound interest in the devotional objects of Catholicism, was
probably responsible for this passage.⁷ Munday lays anachronistic stress
³ S. Schoenbaum, William Shakespeare: A Documentary Life (Oxford: Oxford Univer-

sity Press, 1975), 30–1.
⁴ Frere, Visitation Articles, ii. 126.
⁵ Alan H. Nelson, ed., Cambridge, Records of Early English Drama (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 1989), i. 233.
⁶ Anthony Munday et al., Sir Thomas More, ed. Vittorio Gabrieli and Giorgio
Melchiori (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990), 4. 2. 37–41.
⁷ Munday’s spying on English Catholics in Rome resulted in a tract which details
many such rituals: Anthony Munday, The English Roman Life, ed. Philip J. Ayres
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 45–78. Some critics have wondered whether
Munday may actually have been a crypto-Catholic: Munday, English Roman Life, p. xiv.
Munday’s detailed account of the ‘Papist lies’ about Elizabeth was censored in the second
edition of the English Roman Life.
Introduction 3
on the defacement of the rood (which had not happened by Thomas
More’s time) and is able to make powerful dramatic and aesthetic use of
a devotional artefact that he himself, being born in 1560, had probably
never seen. In Sir Thomas More the figure of a living man who could
have walked up the rood-loft stairs in Catholic times and knelt before the
image blends with the figures of Mary and John kneeling at the foot of
the cross; the blood of Christ’s body which would have been seen on his
statue and displayed from the rood-loft during Benediction is transferred
onto More and the destruction of the rood (the felling of St Paul’s rood
had actually killed someone) becomes metonymic for More’s fall from
grace and the demise of his religion.⁸ This striking image in Sir Thomas
More (a play in which Shakespeare was involved) is evidence of how
relics of medieval religion, even this most vilified example, were not only
known but put to creative use by Shakespeare’s contemporaries. The
allusion is evidence of a framework which, although officially abolished
by the Reformation, could still be used and understood by early modern
writers, readers, and theatregoers.
England’s Catholic past is likewise an abiding presence in Shakes-
peare’s work, although often in slightly more subtle manifestations.
Hamlet, for example, can be read as an extended meditation on maimed
funeral rites. The play begins with a mourning period interrupted by a
wedding—‘the funeral baked meats | Did coldly furnish forth the mar-
riage tables’—and one precipitating cause of its catastrophe is Laertes’s
anger at his father’s obscure burial: ‘No trophy, sword, nor hatchment
o’er his bones, | No noble rite nor formal ostentation.’⁹ Ophelia too is
interred with curtailed obsequies and her brother asks angrily:
Must there no more be done?
· · · · · ·
I tell thee, churlish priest,
A minist’ring angel shall my sister be
When thou liest howling. (5. 1. 229–37)
The angel invoked by Laertes is heard again as Hamlet dies ‘Good night,
sweet prince, | And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest’ (5. 2. 311–12)
⁸ The felling of St Paul’s rood in 1547 killed at least one workman: Margaret
Aston, ‘Iconoclasm in England: Official and Clandestine’, in Clifford Davidson and Ann
Eljenholm Nichols, eds., Iconoclasm vs. Art and Drama (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Medieval
Institute Publications, 1989), 71.
⁹ Hamlet, 1. 2. 179–80, 4. 5. 211–13. All references to Shakespeare’s plays, unless
otherwise stated, are to William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, ed. Stanley Wells and
Gary Taylor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986).
4 Introduction
and here it unmistakably echoes the Latin antiphon sung during the
Requiem Mass: In Paradisum deducant te angeli … aeternum habeas
requiem (May the angels bear you to paradise, and may you have
eternal rest).¹⁰
This echo of Catholic liturgy suggests that these repeatedly disrupted
sacraments engage with the psychic rupture caused by Reformation’s
abandonment of traditional mourning practices. The world of the
play reflects the world in which it was first performed, and with the
destruction of the panoply of Catholicism, rituals become fractured
and fragmentary. The words of the requiem are spoken by a friend
rather than a priest, Ophelia sings ‘lauds’ over her own drowning body,
and Hamlet’s father comes from purgatory to request a rather different
sacrifice than the masses which were traditionally offered for the repose of
souls. These distortions seem to brood over Protestantism’s destruction
of the comforting and familiar rituals of death, and the hero’s stasis
itself can be read as a reflection on the unavailability of official forms of
mourning.¹¹
Criticism which is sensitive to the way that Shakespeare’s plays engage
with the religious obsessions and uncertainties of his time has much to
teach us about his work. We need, however, to disentangle the acknow-
ledgement of Catholic nuances in his plays from the search for evidence
about the beliefs of the writer himself. Anthony Munday was a Protest-
ant spy who persecuted Catholics, and yet his play retains the symbolic
power of the old faith. Finding similar echoes in Shakespeare does not
commit us to believing that he was a crypto-Catholic, an idea which has
recently resurfaced in a blaze of publicity. ‘Catholic Shakespeare’ has
seized the popular imagination and been explored through numerous
books and magazine articles, as well as television shows and confer-
ences, which have suggested that Shakespeare’s ‘signature ambiguity
¹⁰ Peter Milward, The Catholicism of Shakespeare’s Plays (Curdridge: Saint Austin,

1997), 45. See also: Maurice J. Quinlan, ‘Shakespeare and the Catholic Burial Services’,
Shakespeare Quarterly 5 (1954): 303–6; Baldwin Peter, ‘Hamlet and In Paradisum’,
Shakespeare Quarterly 3 (1952): 279–80.
¹¹ Stephen Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2001), 247 and passim; Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became
Shakespeare (London: Jonathan Cape, 2004), 312–22; Gerard Kilroy, ‘Requiem for a
Prince: Rites of Memory in Hamlet’, in Richard Dutton, Alison Findlay, and Richard
Wilson, eds., Theatre and Religion: Lancastrian Shakespeare (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 2003), 143–60; Laurie Maguire, ‘ ‘‘Actions that a man might play’’:
Mourning, Memory, Editing’, Performance Research 7/1 (2002): 74. My grateful thanks
to Laurie Maguire for sending me this paper.
Introduction 5
came from the collision of his Catholic context with his need to
conform’.¹²
We need, however, to recognize the cultural desires which underlie
the Catholic Shakespeare, just as clearly as we can see the cultural
conservatism which bolstered the ‘Anglican’ Shakespeare who preceded
him. Shakespeare is at the heart of the canon in a period which is
uneasy about canonicity, and his postulated Catholicism invests him
with an exciting marginality. Entertaining a ‘Catholic’ Shakespeare is
the intellectual equivalent of the visual effect of looking at the X-
ray photograph of the Flower portrait (reproduced on the cover of this
book): the slight shock with which we recognize the Virgin Mary behind
the familiar hooded eyes of the Bard.¹³ The analogy with the Flower
Portrait, however, is peculiarly potent. Initially the image is startling,
but the explanation is quite matter of fact. A portrait of Shakespeare
¹² Richard Wilson, ‘‘Introduction: A Torturing Hour—Shakespeare and the Martyrs’,

in Richard Dutton, Alison Findlay, and Richard Wilson, eds., Theatre and Religion:
Lancastrian Shakespeare (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 6. This book,
and its companion volume, are the conference proceedings of the Lancaster University
conference about whether Shakespeare was the ‘Shakeshaft’ who was a player in a recusant
Lancashire household in the 1580s: Richard Dutton, Alison Findlay, and Richard Wilson,
eds., Region, Religion and Patronage: Lancastrian Shakespeare (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 2003). For other works on Shakespeare’s Catholicism, see Henry
Sebastian Bowden, The Religion of Shakespeare (London: Burns & Oates, 1899); John
Henry de Groot, The Shakespeares and ‘The Old Faith’ (New York: King’s Crown,
1946); H. Mutschmann and K. Wentersdorf, Shakespeare and Catholicism (New York:
Sheed & Ward, 1952); Peter Milward, Shakespeare’s Religious Background (London:
Sidgwick & Jackson, 1973); Ian Wilson, Shakespeare: The Evidence: Unlocking the
Mysteries of the Man and his Work (London: Headline Book Publishing, 1993); Eric
Sams, The Real Shakespeare: Retrieving the Early Years, 1564–1594 (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1995); Eamon Duffy, ‘Was Shakespeare a Catholic?’, The Tablet, 27
April (1996): 536–8; Milward, The Catholicism of Shakespeare’s Plays; Richard Wilson,
‘Shakespeare and the Jesuits’, Times Literary Supplement, no. 4942, 19 December 1997;
E. A. J. Honigmann, Shakespeare: The ‘Lost Years’, 2nd edn. (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 1998); Park Honan, Shakespeare: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1999), 64–71; Velma Bourgeois Richmond, Shakespeare, Catholicism, and Romance
(London: Continuum, 2000); Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory; Michael Wood, In
Search of Shakespeare (London: BBC Worldwide, 2003), 270–3, 340; Richard Wilson,
Secret Shakespeare: Studies in Theatre, Religion and Resistance (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 2004); Greenblatt, Will in the World; Clare Asquith, Shadowplay: The
Hidden Beliefs and Coded Politics of William Shakespeare (New York: PublicAffairs, 2005).
¹³ Paint analysis has proved conclusively that the Flower portrait is a nineteenth-
century image, and not early seventeenth century, as has been sometimes thought. See
Tarnya Cooper, Searching for Shakespeare (London: National Portrait Gallery, 2006),
72–5. For an earlier overview of theories about the painting, see Paul Bertram and
Frank Cossa, ‘ ‘‘Willm(-) Shakespeare 1609’’: The Flower Portrait Revisited’, Shakespeare
Quarterly 37/1 (1986): 83–96.
6 Introduction
was a saleable commodity; a picture of the Madonna and child was
not. There is no mystery about the reuse of the panel. Shakespeare
painted over the Virgin and Christ child is not a secret code revealing
his true faith but a vivid illustration of the indubitable truth that the
present rises like a phoenix from the ashes of the past. Catholicism lies
behind Shakespeare as surely as it lies behind his image in the Flower
portrait, but not because it can be proved to be what he truly believed.
Catholicism was the faith of England’s past and whatever Shakespeare’s
own doctrinal affiliations we should be neither shocked nor surprised to
find Catholicism underlying his dramaturgy as well as his portrait.
Drama is a synthesis of visual and verbal and Shakespeare’s dramaturgy
is sensitive both to the intensely visual aspects of his Catholic cultural
heritage and to the rich verbal texture of Protestantism with its long,
punning sermons, catechizing, Prayer Book, witty Marprelate tracts,
and, above all, the Bible to be heard and read in English. This book
engages with the way in which Shakespeare appropriated both the
linguistic wealth of the English Bible and the theatrical splendour
of liturgy, images, and mystery plays from England’s recent Catholic
past in order to enrich his plays. It will not attempt to unravel
Shakespeare’s beliefs, but instead will explore the influence of the sacred
texts and traditions of his time on his dramaturgy and argue for the new
interpretative possibilities which live in these religious nuances.
The two first chapters will tease out the shaping effect of both
Protestant and Catholic religious culture on his dramaturgy in order
to establish a foundation from which to pursue the in-depth studies
undertaken in the rest of the book. The first chapter is about the
primary text of Shakespeare’s society—the Bible—and its relationship
with the stage: its familiarity to both Shakespeare and his audience, and
the way that stage censorship fostered subtle allusion and engagement
with biblical themes. The second chapter looks at residual Catholicism
in early modern culture, focusing on the mystery plays, and argues that
their Incarnational aesthetic was inherited by Shakespeare.
The rest of the book will centre on close readings of Shakespeare’s plays
and consider how both the religious consciousness of the time and the
relics of medievalism in early modern England affected his dramaturgy.
It will focus on the first half of Shakespeare’s career—from King John to
Measure for Measure —because critical work on Christian and Catholic
nuances in Shakespeare has tended to focus on the reconciliations and
theophanies of the late plays and mature tragedies. The readings given
here of these earlier plays show that from the beginning of his career
Introduction 7
Shakespeare uses biblical allusions, strengthened by staging which recalls
liturgy or the mystery cycles, to explore and enrich the wider concerns
of his drama.
The third chapter establishes a previously unrecognized allusion to
Easter, and the Easter sepulchre, in Romeo and Juliet. It argues that the
religious echoes confer sanctity on the young couple and encourages the
audience expectation that Juliet will rise from her tomb. The paschal
motif strengthens the comedic impulse of the play, created through
comic characters and the subject matter of young love, and so increases
the powerful shock of the tragic ending. The fourth chapter argues that
in another of Shakespeare’s early plays, King John, Christian imagery
is likewise used to enhance the sympathetic portrayal of one of the
protagonists, in a way fundamentally opposed to the Christic imagery
of his sources. Shakespeare takes the crypto-religious quality which
surrounds the king in his sources and transfers it on to Arthur. Instead
of the proto-Protestant martyr king, it is now the innocent boy who
is the locus for holiness in the play. The sympathy for the innocent
suffering of Arthur is intensified by the powerful language and theatrical
memory of the Passion, particularly in the blinding scene of Act 4
Scene 1. The biblical echoes interact with the political concerns of the
play and form part of the wider conception of Arthur as the true king,
unique to Shakespeare’s telling of the story.
The fifth and sixth chapters consider in greater depth Shakespeare’s
engagement with the language of divine right. The fifth chapter focuses
on 1 Henry IV, contextualizing it within the religious iconography
employed by the eponymous kings of Richard II and Henry V. This
chapter argues for the Incarnational nuance of Hal’s self-fashioning as
a Cheapside rogue turned royal prince. Hal stages his own redemption
in Christian terms: a Lenten period of expectant, self-imposed exile is
followed by a reconciliation between father and son through a decisive
single combat with a rebellious enemy. The dramatic form of the liturgy,
the biblical story, and the mystery plays, have been appropriated by Hal
to invest his own history with its power.
The final chapter looks at Shakespeare’s first play after the regime
change of 1603 and considers how the fusion of divine and royalist
imagery examined in King John and 1 Henry IV is affected by the
advent of the new king. Measure for Measure is one of a cluster of
plays performed before the king shortly after his accession which have
a disguised protagonist. Angelo’s allusion to ‘power divine’, combined
with the biblical title of the play, has led some critics and directors to
8 Introduction
posit a connection between the Duke and Christ. By exploring new
biblical and mystery play sources for parts of the play—in particular
the scenes between the Duke and Lucio and the reappearance of
Claudio—this chapter both creates a firmer basis for this supposition
and questions the praise implicit in some Christianized readings of the
play. Divine aspects of the Duke’s enterprise may flatter the king, but
Shakespeare also suggests through them the impossibility of a perfect
imitation of Christ in an earthly ruler. The play engages with and
critiques contemporary conflations of human and divine law, and this
chapter argues that central to this is the creation of a divine image of
rule, which the Duke cannot sustain.
In the portrayal of the Duke of Measure for Measure, as in the portrayal
of Hal or King John, biblical echoes may appear to fall in with the
language of power, but on closer scrutiny Shakespeare is not simply
parroting the royalist panegyric of his age. The three very different
rulers all attempt to project a holy image of themselves in these plays.
Shakespeare, however, uses biblical language and analogues to suggest
the fundamental dichotomy between earthly kingship and Christ’s rule.
Biblical echoes which are present in Measure for Measure, King John,
the first tetralogy, and Romeo and Juliet are more complicated than
has often been realized. The matrix of associations surrounding such
an intensely analysed and almost overfamiliar text, ensure that biblical
allusions are complex and multifaceted. Shakespearean drama explores
and exploits this ambiguity to its utmost. Shakespeare draws on the
emotional and dramatic power of biblical stories—familiar through
Bible reading, liturgy, mystery cycles, and the fading visual culture of
Catholicism—and assimilates it into his own secular drama.
This book argues for the influence of both embodied and verbal
religious forms on Shakespeare’s stagecraft, as elements in a drama
which integrates word and image. The Reformation involved a tug of
war over competing epistemologies. In medieval England, according
to Walter Ong, ‘the culture as a whole assimilated the biblical word
not verbatim but as an oral culture typically assimilates a message,
thematically and formulaically, tribally rather than individually’.¹⁴ With
the Reformation came the insistence on sola scriptura, the logocentrism
of the reformer’s programme decisively empowered by print which
made exact, almost unvarying texts possible. Typographical accuracy
¹⁴ Walter Ong, The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious
History (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1971), 269.
Introduction 9
gave a strong foundation for a semantic system which relied on the
written, printed word as the bearer of truth. This was in sharp contrast
with the biblical drama of the mystery cycles which was less concerned
with literal fidelity to the words of Scripture than with emotional
engagement with its patterns of fall and redemption, judgement and
salvation.¹⁵ Shakespearean drama, however, unites these approaches.
Shakespeare’s intimate knowledge of the biblical text, as the following
chapters will demonstrate, allows him to allude to it in verbally specific
ways. However, he also inherits from earlier English drama a thematic
and formulaic interpretation of the Bible based on the emotional
power of recurring patterns. This book aims to articulate the way that
Shakespeare’s verbally sophisticated, embodied drama engaged with the
religious culture in which both he and his works were embedded.
¹⁵ Ibid. 272; Michael O’Connell, The Idolatrous Eye: Iconoclasm and Theater in Early
Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 28–9.
1
Drama and the Word: The Bible on the
Early Modern Stage
In Love’s Labour’s Lost Shakespeare presents on-stage a biblically illiterate
audience. When presented with the Pageant of the Nine Worthies
Berowne and his companions feign ignorance and affect to mistake
Judas Maccabaeus for Judas Iscariot:
 (as Judas) Judas I am—
 A Judas?
 Not Iscariot, sir.
(As Judas) Judas I am, yclept Maccabaeus.
 Judas Maccabaeus clipped is plain Judas.
 A kissing traitor. (5. 2. 590–5)
Holofernes’s ‘Not Iscariot’ is itself a biblical quotation: John’s Gospel
stresses that Judas son of James is speaking by stipulating: ‘Iudas
said unto him (not Iscariot)’.¹ Dumaine’s slightly forced use of the
word ‘clipped’ (meaning shortened) sets up Berowne’s pun on ‘clipped’
(meaning embraced). This joke indicates the currency of the knowledge
that Judas betrayed Jesus with a kiss, as this kind of humour relies
on being widely and immediately recognized. A more subtle biblical
knowledge is assumed in Boyet’s final line to Holofernes: ‘a light for
Monsieur Judas! It grows dark; he may stumble’ (5. 2. 624). This alludes
to the biblical passage about night having fallen when Judas left the Last
Supper, a metaphor for the darkness within his heart: ‘assoone then as
he had receiued the sop, he went immediatly out, and it was night’
(John 13: 30).²
¹ John 14: 22. All biblical references, unless otherwise stated, are to The Bible,
Translated according to The Ebrew and Greeke, and conferred with the best translations in
diuers Languages (London, 1594). This is the Geneva Bible, which is the version which
Shakespeare seems to have known best. For the evidence of Shakespeare’s knowledge of
different biblical versions, see below.
² Thomas Carter, Shakespeare and Holy Scripture: with the Version he used (London:
Hodder & Stoughton, 1905), 38. Most modern editors do not recognize the allusion.
Drama and the Word 11
Many biblical allusions in Shakespeare are seamlessly integrated into
the text and it is difficult to tell whether he, or his audience, were
aware of them; although as Shakespeare’s audience was part of only
the second generation to whom an English Bible was accessible, its
language would not yet have become simply proverbial.³ Passages such
as this, however, where jokes and puns would make no sense without the
biblical context, show Shakespeare consciously using biblical quotation
and holding up biblical illiteracy—confusing Judas Maccabaeus with
Judas Iscariot—as something which can destroy theatrical presentation.
Judas’s kiss was proverbial, but the joke about his exit into darkness
at the Last Supper suggests that Shakespeare expected his audience to
recognize allusions even to relatively obscure parts of biblical stories.⁴
Shakespeare can stage biblically learned spectators feigning ignorance in
his comedy precisely because he knows that most of his audience will
catch the references and laugh at the jokes. Shakespeare’s audience not
only knew the Bible, but could be relied on to bring their knowledge to
what they saw on the stage.⁵
The Bible was a unique resource for early modern playwrights as,
unlike the classics or even the chronicle histories, it was known by the
vast majority of their audience. Church attendance was compulsory in
Elizabethan England and every person who did not attend their parish
church each Sunday and on holy days had to pay a fine of twelve
pence for every abstention. The increasing fear of Catholicism later
in Elizabeth’s reign led to the fines being increased, and legislation in
1581 imposed the immense penalty of twenty pounds a month for those
absenting themselves from church.⁶ The documentary evidence suggests
³ Richmond Noble, Shakespeare’s Biblical Knowledge and the Use of the Book of
Common Prayer as Exemplified in the Plays of the First Folio (London: Macmillan, 1935),
41.
⁴ This passage in John 13 was also used by Shakespeare in Macbeth, when Macbeth
leaves the supper table at which Duncan, the master he intends to betray and the man
he intends to murder, is eating his last meal. On leaving Duncan, Macbeth’s words (‘if
it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well | It were done quickly’ (1. 7. 1–2) ) recall
Jesus’ words to Judas at the Last Supper: ‘that thou doest, doe quickely’ (John 13: 27).
See Roy Walker, The Time is Free: A Study of Macbeth (London: Andrew Dakers, 1946),
53–5.
⁵ For more on this argument, see Harold Fisch, The Biblical Presence in Shakespeare,
Milton and Blake: A Comparative Study (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 17;
Gerald M. Pinciss, Forbidden Matter: Religion in the Drama of Shakespeare and His
Contemporaries (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2000), 15–16.
⁶ Frere, Visitation Articles, iii. 168; William Page, ed., Warwick in The Victoria History
of the Counties of England (London: Archibald Constable, 1908), ii. 37.
12 Drama and the Word
that the majority of English people not only attended church but also
partook in its central rites: there was near universal baptism and, at
Easter at least, most also received communion.⁷ Religious conformity
was not left to the individual conscience, but imposed by the order of
law, and legislation was likewise passed requiring all heads of families
to instruct their children in the catechism and principles of religion.⁸
Recent historical research in the field of late Elizabethan and early
Jacobean popular religion has suggested that this programme of reform
was to a large extent successful and most people’s beliefs could be
characterized as ‘unspectacular orthodoxy’.⁹
Protestantism was a religion of the Word, but this did not mean
that the illiterate were exempt from the drive towards religious uni-
formity. The religious literacy of Shakespeare’s audience—their ability
to recognize allusions to the Bible or Christian ideas in his work—has
a complex relationship with actual literacy. Protestant evangelism in
post-Reformation England championed educational reform and even
the most conservative estimates suggest that it was not only the noble-
men in Shakespeare’s audience who could read and write. According to
David Cressy’s seminal study, the overwhelming majority of London
tradesmen could sign their name by the early seventeenth century, but
even this has been widely regarded as a ‘spectacular underestimate’ of
reading ability in the period.¹⁰
Those who could read would have been familiar with basic Christian
tenets from their infancy: they learnt from hornbooks inscribed with
the Lord’s Prayer and their earliest schooling was based on Bible
⁷ Martin Ingram, ‘From Reformation to Toleration: Popular Religious Culture in

England, 1540–1690’, in Tim Harris, ed., Popular Culture in England, c. 1500–1850
(London: Macmillan, 1995), 110; J. P. Boulton, ‘The Limits of Formal Religion: The
Administration of Holy Communion in Late Elizabethan and Early Stuart London’, The
London Journal 10/2 (1984): 137; Patrick Collinson, The Religion of Protestants: The
Church in English Society 1559–1625 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 212.
⁸ Ivy Pinchbeck and Margaret Hewitt, in Children in English Society, i. From Tudor
Times to the Eighteenth Century (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972), 260.
⁹ The phrase is from Martin Ingram, Church Courts, Sex and Marriage in England
157/0–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 94, 123.
¹⁰ David Cressy, Literacy and the Social Order: Reading and Writing in Tudor and
Stuart England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 146–7; Margaret
Spufford, ‘First Steps in Literacy: The Reading and Writing Experiences of the Humblest
Seventeenth-Century Spiritual Autobiographers’, Social History 4/3 (1979): 407–35;
Keith Thomas, ‘The Meaning of Literacy in Early Modern England’, in Gerd Bau-
mann, ed., The Written Word: Literacy in Transition (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1985), 103.
reading.¹¹ But even complete illiteracy was compatible with reasonably
sophisticated religious knowledge. In addition to compulsory church
attendance, crowds of people flocked to public sermons and preaching
was a large part of the appeal of Protestantism in a semi-literate culture.¹²
William Prynne angrily proclaimed that there was ‘no Analogie betweene
Preachers and Players, Sermons and Playes, Theaters and Churches’, but
it seems that he was fighting against a public who enjoyed both forms
of entertainment and instruction. The substantial audience overlap
for sermons and plays meant that, as Bryan Crockett has suggested,
‘preachers could assume a high degree of receptivity to oral performance,
as the playwrights could assume their audiences’ tendency to cast their
experiences is religious terms’.¹³
Catechisms were also an essential form of religious instruction for
those who could not read, and children, servants, and apprentices were
sent to church on Sundays, an hour before the evening service began,
to be catechized by the priest. Catechisms were immensely popular; it
has been estimated that by the early seventeenth century there were
over one million catechisms in circulation in a population of about
four million.¹⁴ Catechisms with titles such as A breefe Catechisme so
necessarie and easie to be learned euen of the symple sort (1576), or
A Catechisme, or short kind of Instruction, whereby to teach children
and the Ignoravnter sort (1588), indicate that the authors of these
aphoristic texts had an illiterate or semi-literate market in mind. Many
introductory epistles stressed the duty of the buyer to ‘instruct your
children and servants in this Catechisme’ and Thomas Sparke and John
Seddon’s catechism details how the literate members of a household
could teach the illiterate by reading and explaining more complex
concepts to them. Such a vision may seem implausibly idealistic,
¹¹ Margaret Spufford, ‘ ‘‘I bought me a primer’’, or, ‘‘How godly were the multitude?’’:
The Basic Religious Concepts of Those Who Could Read in the Seventeenth Century’,
in Spufford, ed., The World of Rural Dissenters, 1520–1725 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1995), 72–3, 85; Spufford, ‘First Steps in Literacy’, 410–11.
¹² Collinson, Religion of Protestants, 243–5, 257–64.
¹³ William Prynne, Histrio-Mastix (London, 1633), 934; Bryan Crockett, The Play
of Paradox: Stage and Sermon in Renaissance England (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 1995), 7. See also Martha Tuck Rozett, The Doctrine of Election
and the Emergence of Elizabethan Tragedy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984),
15 ff.; Jeffrey Knapp, Shakespeare’s Tribe: Church, Nation, and Theater in Renaissance
England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 5–6.
¹⁴ Ian Green, The Christian’s ABC: Catechisms and Catechizing in England c.1530–
1740 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 102–6; Spufford, ‘ ‘‘I bought me a
primer’’ ’, 73.
but Lady Margaret Hoby’s diary gives evidence of how, in godly
households at least, servants were read to from the Bible and involved
in religious discussions. The preface to Eusebius Paget’s immensely
popular catechism Short questions and answeares (1584) claims: ‘in
foure monethes space, I have seene these principles and aunsweres,
learned by Gentelmen, Yeomen, Horskeeperes, Shepheardes, Cartars,
Mylkemaydes, Kitchenboyes, & al in that houshold (where these orders
were observed)’.¹⁵
There were also less didactic means of religious instruction open to
those on the margins of literacy, such as the singing of psalms. The
popularity of this pastime is shown not only by the many references to it
(such as Falstaff ’s quip: ‘I would I were a weaver—I could sing psalms
or anything’ (1 Henry IV, 2. 5. 132–3) ) but also by the staggering
124 editions of Sternhold and Hopkins’s Psalms in English Meter which
were printed (1583–1608).¹⁶ The visual culture of pre-Reformation
England had also not entirely disappeared, and had to some extent been
appropriated by the lurid pictures in Foxe’s Actes and Monuments, which
was the only major European reformed martyrology to be illustrated.¹⁷
Pictures helped to sell books at both ends of the market, and ballads
and pamphlets were often illustrated with didactic images, in a similar
manner to Foxe’s lavish folio. Tessa Watt’s excellent study of cheap
print in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries has argued
that the huge trade in ballads, broadsides, and chapbooks illustrates the
¹⁵ Stephen Denison, A Compendious Catechisme: Wherein are briefly expounded,

the Apostles Creed, the ten commandements and the Lords prayer, together with other
fundamentall points of Christian Religion, very necessary for children and servantes to
learne, before they go to the holy communion (London, 1632), A3r ; Thomas Sparke and
John Seddon, A Catechisme, or short kind of Instruction, whereby to teach children and
the Ignoraunter sort, the Christian Religion (Oxford, 1588), A3v –4r ; The Private Life
of an Elizabethan Lady: The Diary of Lady Margaret Hoby 1599–1605, ed. Joanne
Moody (Stroud: Sutton, 1998), 3, 24, 35, 38–9, 48, 144; Eusebius Paget, Short
questions and answeares, contayning the Summe of Christian Religion (London, 1584),
A3r−v . This latter catechism went through at least nineteen editions between 1579
and 1639.
¹⁶ Peter Blayney, ‘The Publication of Playbooks’, in John D. Cox and David Scott
Kastan, eds., A New History of Early English Drama (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1997), 388. For contemporary witness to psalm-singing in the period see Nicolas
Bownde, The Doctrine of the Sabbath, Plainely layde forth, and soundly proued by testimonies
both of holy Scripture, and also of olde and newe ecclesiasticall writers (London, 1595),
Iir−v ; Diary of Lady Margaret Hoby, 38.
¹⁷ For the importance and popularity of Foxe’s illustrations see Andrew Pettegree,
‘Illustrating the Book: A Protestant Dilemma’, in Christopher Highley and John N.
King, eds., John Foxe and his World (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), 133–44.
piety of ordinary people, including those on the fringes of literacy.¹⁸
The prevalence of cheap religious print, catechizing, sermons, Bible
reading, and churchgoing ensured that even the illiterate were familiar
with basic religious concepts and Bible stories.
At the beginning of the Reformation, when illiteracy was rife, the
stage itself was enlisted as a means for promulgating the Gospel. Foxe
even classed the theatre with sermons and books as a didactic tool,
writing that ‘plaiers, Printers, Preachers’ were ‘a triple bulwarke against
the triple crowne of the Pope’.¹⁹ Protestants such as Martin Bucer, John
Bale, and Foxe embraced the didactic potential of theatre. Early in the
English Reformation Bucer, writing for the young Edward VI, described
how Scripture could be used as a source for the stage:
The Scriptures everywhere offer an abundant supply of material for tragedies,
in almost all the stories of the holy patriarchs, kings, prophets, apostles, from
the time of Adam, the first parent of mankind. For these stories are filled with
divine and heroic personages, emotions, customs, actions and also events which
turned out contrary to what was expected, which Aristotle calls a reversal.20
Theodore de Bèze himself dramatized the sacrifice of Isaac and his
play was a phenomenal success, going into ten editions in the sixteenth
century and translated into Italian, Latin, and English.²¹ In the early
Reformation period there were new plays written in England on New
Testament subjects such as Grimald’s Christus Redivivus (1543) and
Foxe’s Christus Triumphans (1556).²² In the 1530s John Bale set to
work to write a series of biblical plays which were presumably meant
to be a purified form of the mystery cycles, although the plays that
survive show how differently the same stories could be dramatized by a
Protestant playwright. In Bale’s God’s Promises (1538), for example, the
¹⁸ Tessa Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1991), 322–3. Cf. Peter Lake, ‘Deeds against Nature: Cheap Print,
Protestantism and Murder in Early Seventeenth Century England’, in Kevin Sharpe
and Peter Lake, eds., Culture and Politics in Early Stuart England (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1993), 277.
¹⁹ John Foxe, Actes and Monuments […] (London, 1583), ii. 1348.
²⁰ Martin Bucer, De Regno Christi (1550) in Melanchthon and Bucer, ed. Wilhelm
Pauck (London: SCM, 1969), 51.
²¹ Theodore de Bèze, A Tragedie of Abrahams Sacrifice, Written in french by Theodore
Beza, and translated into Inglish, by A[rthur] G[olding] (London, 1577); O’Connell, The
Idolatrous Eye, 104.
²² For records of other new plays on the New Testament (up to 1561), see Alfred
Harbage, Annals of English Drama 975–1700: An Analytical Record of all Plays, Extant
or Lost, Chronologically Arranged and Indexed by Authors, Titles, Dramatic Companies &c,
edn. Sylvia Stoler Wagonheim, 3rd edn. (London: Routledge, 1989), 4–38.
traditional cycle play about the prophecies of Christ’s birth is reworked
so that it centres on the eradication of idolatry.
From the Elizabethan period however, Protestant biblical theatre
began to encounter censorship. Elizabeth issued a proclamation early in
her reign prohibiting unlicensed interludes (16 May 1559) which stated
that nothing could be played: ‘Wherein either matters of religion or of
the governance of the estate of the commonweale shall be handled or
treated, being no meet matters to be written or treated upon, but by
men of authority, learning and wisdom, nor to be handled before any
audience, but of grave and discreet persons.’²³ What this proclamation
(penned by the Queen herself) suggests is that religious theatre was
becoming a victim of its own success. The Latin plays, such as those
by Grimald and Foxe were acceptable to those in authority; English
biblical drama performed for a large, uneducated audience was not.
The popularity of biblically based drama is evident from the vigorous
tradition of scriptural theatre which was sustained into the late Eliza-
bethan period, despite the censorship and censoriousness it provoked.
The next chapter will look at the traditional biblical theatre of the
mystery plays, but Bale was not the only Protestant to follow their lead.
There is some evidence of Protestant staging of the Passion itself in
Elizabeth’s reign. Thomas Beard’s Theatre of God’s Judgements (1597)
notes God’s vengeance on what was presumably a university play about
the Crucifixion:
In the Vniversity of Oxford the history of Christ was also played, and cruelly
punished, and that not many yeares since: for he that bore the person of Christ,
the Lord struck him with such a giddinesse of spirit and brain, that he became
mad forthwith, crying when he was in his best humour, That God had laid this
judgment upon him for playing Christ.24
There is also a record of a new Passion play being staged by Thomas
Ashton, the Protestant headmaster of Shrewsbury school, who fostered
the dramatic talents of his students (among them Philip Sidney and
Fulke Greville) with regular performances. A rather damaged document
records that in 1560 the school performed ‘Mr Ashton’s first playe
playe [sic] vpon the passion of Christe’. Thomas Ashton’s productions
²³ Tudor Royal Proclamations, ed. Paul L. Hughes and James F. Larkin (New Haven,
Conn.: Yale University Press, 1964–9), ii. 115.
²⁴ Thomas Beard, The Theatre of Gods Judgements […], 4th edn. (London, 1648), 147.
appear to have been mounted to great applause: the local poet Thomas
Churchyard estimates they were seen by twenty thousand spectators and
Queen Elizabeth herself attempted to see his play of Julian the Apostate
in 1565–6.²⁵
Although Ashton’s play is a strikingly late example of a new Passion
play, there were a large number of plays on wider biblical themes
written and performed at the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign, such as
Lewis Wager’s Life and Repentaunce of Marie Magdalene (1566–7),
which likewise portrayed Jesus on the stage. Many of the plays—such
as A Pretie new Enterlude both pithie & pleasaunt of the Story of Kyng
Daryus, Beinge taken out of the third and fourth Chapter of the thyrd
booke of Edras (printed 1565, with a second edition in 1577)—proudly
declared their biblical source. After the 1560s biblical drama became
less common, but four biblical plays printed between the opening of
the Theatre and the end of Elizabeth’s reign are extant: Theodore de
Bèze’s Abraham’s Sacrifice (1577), Thomas Garter’s The Most Virtuous
and Godly Susanna (1578), Thomas Lodge and Robert Greene’s A
Looking-Glasse for London and England (1594), and George Peele’s
The Love of King David and Fair Bethsabe (entered 1594, published
1599). However, there is evidence that many similar plays have been
lost. Henslowe’s diary, for example, records performances for numerous
biblical plays including Abraham and Lot (1594), Hester and Asseuerus
(1594), Nebuchadnezzer (1596–7), William Haughton, William Birde,
and Samuel Rowley’s Judas (1602), Pontius Pilate (1602), Anthony
Munday and Thomas Dekker’s Jephthah (1602), Henry Chettle’s Tobias
(1602), Samson (1602), and Samuel Rowley’s Joshua (1602).²⁶
Such plays show that the theatregoing public was enthusiastic about
watching biblical subjects on their stage, and in some cases also indicate
the audience’s prior familiarity with such stories. In George Peele’s
²⁵ J. Alan B. Somerset, ed., Shropshire, Records of Early English Drama (Toronto:

University of Toronto Press, 1994), i. 201; Katherine Duncan-Jones, Sir Philip Sidney:
Courtier Poet (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1991), 31. For the evidence as to whether
this really was a Passion play, see Patrick Collinson, ‘The Shearman’s Tree and the
Preacher: The Strange Death of Merry England in Shrewsbury and Beyond’, in Patrick
Collinson and John Craig, eds., The Reformation in English Towns, 1500–1640 (London:
Macmillan, 1998), 218; O’Connell, The Idolatrous Eye, 101 n. 24.
²⁶ Henslowe’s Diary, ed. Walter W. Greg (London: A. H. Bullen, 1904), i. 8v –9r ,
25v –26r , 69v , 95r –96r , 105v –106v , 108r ; Lily B. Campbell, Divine Poetry and Drama
in Sixteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959), 240–2.
The Love of King David and Fair Bethsabe, for example, a popular and
long-running play, dramatic irony depends on the audience’s knowledge
of the story.²⁷ The play is littered with references to Absalom’s hair, and
the anticipatory dread of this motif only works if the audience knows
how he dies. There is also a presentiment of his death after his first
disobedience when he is reconciled to his father with the words: ‘ah
Absalon my sonne, ah my sonne Absolon’. These words echo David’s
lament over his son’s death in 2 Samuel, and they reappear in the
play after Absalom has died: ‘O Absalon, Absalon, O my sonne, my
sonne, | Would God that I had died for Absalon.’²⁸ The fame of these
mourning words is confirmed by Sidney’s use of them in the New
Arcadia. When Philoclea believes Pamela to be dead she cries: ‘Pamela,
my sister, my sister, Pamela, woe is me for thee, I would I died for
thee.’²⁹ The pre-echo of the phrase before Absalom’s death in David
and Bethsabe is evidence that the theatre audience were expected to
be scripturally literate, just as the more educated audience for Sidney’s
Arcadia was.³⁰
There were also plays which incorporated biblical stories and themes
with a certain degree of theological sophistication. The parable of the
prodigal son, for example, which was ubiquitous in Elizabethan comedy
from Nice Wanton (1550) through to The Famous Victories of Henry
the Fifth (1586), was combined with Roman comedy to create a new
and relatively sophisticated theological form. The integration creates a
distinctively Christian theme: the old man who needs to be subdued
is not the Senex of Roman comedy, but the internalized ‘old man’ of
²⁷ Its popularity is suggested by the title page, which declares ‘As it hath ben diuers
times plaied in the stage’, and by the fact that fourteen copies of the original quarto survive:
Murray Roston, Biblical Drama in England: From the Middle Ages to the Present Day
(London: Faber & Faber, 1968), 100. Henslowe’s diary records a payment in October
1602 for the Earl of Worcester’s men ‘pd for poleyes & worckmanshipp for to hange
absolome … xiiijd ’, which either alludes to a new play about Absalom or indicates the
longevity of Peele’s play: Henslowe’s Diary, i. 116v .
²⁸ George Peele, The Love of King David and Fair Bethsabe, ed. W.W. Greg (Oxford:
The Malone Society Reprints, 1912), ll. 987, 1925–8. The words are from 2 Samuel
18: 33: ‘O my sonne Absalom, my sonne, my sonne Absalom: woulde God I had dyed
for thee.’
²⁹ Philip Sidney, The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, ed. Maurice Evans (Har-
mondsworth: Penguin, 1977), 558.
³⁰ The first and chief audience for both versions of the Arcadia was Sidney’s sister
Mary, Countess of Pembroke: Duncan-Jones, Sir Philip Sidney, 143, 192. Professor
Duncan-Jones also draws attention to the more strongly charged religious language of
the revised version (in which this phrase is found), ibid. 263.
Ephesians.³¹ More solidly Protestant drama, such as the anonymous
Jacob and Esau (1568), performed a protracted staging of reformed
dogma, in this case the doctrine of election and reprobation:
But before Jacob and Esau yet borne were,
Or had eyther done good, or yll perpetrate:
As the prophete Malachie and Paule witnesse beare,
Jacob was chosen, and Esau reprobate:
Jacob I loue (sayde God) and Esau I hate.
For it is not (sayth Paule) in mans renuing or will,
But in Gods mercy who choseth whome he will.³²
Protestant doctrine, however, might influence drama in more subtle

ways. Scott McMillin and Sally-Beth MacLean, for example, have sug-
gested that the Queen’s Men, with their connections with Leicester and
Walsingham, and their drama which insisted on ‘truth’ and ‘plainness’,
were spreading Protestant ideology in scarcely perceptible ways as they
toured throughout the country.³³
It is likewise possible that the Queen’s Men were involved in the most
contentious performance of theological controversy on the Elizabethan
stage, and that this involvement led to their decline as a leading London
company.³⁴ The Martin Marprelate scandal raged from 1588 to 1590
and when more scholarly attempts to answer his anti-episcopal satire
had failed, the ecclesiastical authorities employed the prose wits of the
age to quash him. Nashe makes it clear that the anti-Martinists brought
the dispute into the theatre: ‘Me thought Vetus Comaedia beganne to
pricke him at London in the right vaine, when shee brought foorth
Divinitie wyth a scratcht face, holding her hart as if she were sicke,
because Martin would have forced her.’³⁵ Graphic descriptions of scenes
³¹ Ervin Beck, ‘Terence Improved: The Paradigm of the Prodigal Son in English
Renaissance Drama’, Renaissance Drama 6 (1973): 107–22. See also Alan R. Young,
The English Prodigal Son Plays: A Theatrical Fashion of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth
Centuries (Salzburg: Salzburg University Press, 1979), 121. Both Young and Beck note
the importance of the prodigal son plot for many Shakespearean plays.
³² Jacob and Esau, ed. John Crow and F. P. Wilson (Oxford: Malone Society Reprints,
1956), ll. 8–14. For other predestinarian sections in the play, see ll. 150–1, 230–1,
447–50, 891, 981, 1471–8, 1780–91, 1801–19.
³³ Scott McMillin and Sally-Beth MacLean, The Queen’s Men and Their Plays
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), ch. 2.
³⁴ Ibid. 49–55.
³⁵ The Works of Thomas Nashe, ed. Ronald B. McKerrow (London: A. H. Bullen,
1904–10), i. 92. For a discussion of the connection of the Marprelate controversy
with the stage see Patrick Collinson, ‘Ecclesiastical Vitriol: Religious Satire in the 1590s
in which Martin has been wormed, lanced, bled, whipped, and beaten
are frequently detailed in the anti-Martin tracts to show how he has been
‘made a Maygame vpon the Stage’. The scurrilous anti-Martin plays are
an explicit example of how theological debate could contribute directly
to popular drama. They were played out on the stage of the Theatre
at the start of Shakespeare’s career and there is evidence that he was
himself influenced by the stage Martin.³⁶
This particularly vivid example of the alliance between theology
and the theatre, however, was also probably directly responsible for
the increased censorship which was to force playwrights to approach
religious subjects in less open ways. In 1589 a Censorship Commission
was created to ‘stryke oute or reforme suche partes and matters as
they shall fynd unfytt and undecent to be handled in playes, both for
Divinitie and State’.³⁷ This hardening of the law against biblical theatre
was replaced by a blanket ban in 1606 when the Act to restrain the
Abuses of Players made it illegal in ‘any Stage play, Interlude, Shewe,
Maygame, or Pageant jestingly or prophanely speake or use the holy
Name of God or of Christ Jesus, or of the Holy Ghoste or of the
Trinitie’.³⁸ The theatre reacted by using the word ‘Jove’ as a signifier
for God, but authorities recognized that pagan religion was often used
to mask profanity. One piece of evidence for this comes from the
and the Invention of Puritanism’, in John Guy, ed., The Reign of Elizabeth I: Court
and Culture in the Last Decade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 154,
159, 165–9; Kristen Poole, ‘Facing Puritanism: Falstaff, Martin Marprelate and the
Grotesque Puritan’, in Ronald Knowles, ed., Shakespeare and Carnival: After Bakhtin
(London: Macmillan, 1998), 97–122; Robert Hornback, ‘Staging Puritanism in the Early
1590s: The Carnivalesque Rebellious Clown as Anti-Puritan Stereotype’, Renaissance and
Reformation/Renaissance et Réforme 24/3 (2000): 31–67; Ritchie D. Kendall, The Drama
of Dissent: The Radical Poetics of Nonconformity, 1380–1590 (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 1986), 176–87.
³⁶ For the influence of Martin on the creation of Falstaff, see below, ch. 5. Robert
Hornback has argued that other Shakespearean characters (such as Jack Cade) also show
the influence of the Marprelate plays: Hornback, ‘Staging Puritanism’, 44–50.
³⁷ Acts of the Privy Council of England, AD 1589–90, ed. John Roche Dasent
(London: His Majesty’s Stationary Office, 1890–1964), xviii. 215. See also Richard
Dutton, ‘Censorship’, in John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan, eds., A New History of
Early English Drama (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 295.
³⁸ E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1923),
iv. 338–9. See also Gary Taylor, ‘Swounds Revisited: Theatrical, Editorial, and Literary
Expurgation’, in Gary Taylor and John Jowett, eds., Shakespeare Reshaped 1606–1623
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 51–106.
astonishing fine incurred by the players of the Fortune for what was
presumably a parody of Laudian worship:
Thursday last [2 May 1639] the players of the Fortune were fined £1,000 for
setting up an altar, a bason, and two candlesticks, and bowing down before it
upon the stage, and although they allege it was an old play revived, and an altar
to the heathen gods, yet it was apparent that this play was revived on purpose
in contempt of the ceremonies of the Church.39
The exploitation of pagan rites, so common in Shakespeare’s late
plays, is only one example of the way in which censorship, through
outlawing openly Christian drama, unintentionally promoted a subtle
and sophisticated engagement with biblical language and Christian ideas
in ostensibly secular plays. The censorship of the early 1590s shows that
the authorities were turning away from the overtly Christian drama,
popular in the Edwardian and early Elizabethan periods, and becoming
unwilling to employ theatrical companies, such as the Queen’s Men,
for distinctively Protestant aims. Annabel Patterson has written on
the enabling aspect of censorship in this period, the way in which it
led writers to exploit the ‘functional ambiguity’ of language.⁴⁰ The
censorship of the 1590s may have indirectly fostered the complex and
fruitful engagement with biblical language and stories which we find
emerging in Elizabethan drama at precisely this time.
Shakespeare inherited a language enriched by a vigorous tradition of
biblical translation in the decades before his birth and throughout his
lifetime.⁴¹ His own knowledge of the Bible was excellent. It has long
been recognized that Shakespeare was familiar with a range of biblical
versions, in particular the Bishops’ Bible (1568) and Geneva Bible
³⁹ William Douglas Hamilton, ed., Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series, of the
Reign of Charles 1. 1639 (London: Longman & Co., Trubner & Co., 1873), clxx. 140.
See also Gerald Eades Bentley, The Profession of a Dramatist in Shakespeare’s Time:
1590–1642 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), 179–81; E. K. Chambers,
William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1930/1988), i. 240–1.
⁴⁰ Annabel Patterson, Censorship and Interpretation: The Conditions of Writing and
Reading in Early Modern England (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), 18
and passim.
⁴¹ For connections between Shakespeare’s and Tyndale’s language see David Daniell,
‘Shakespeare and the Protestant Mind’, Shakespeare Survey 54 (2001): 5–7; Brian
Cummings, ‘Hamlet’s Luck: Shakespeare and the Sixteenth-century Bible’ (Tyndale
Society IX Annual Lecture, Oxford, October 2003).
(1560).⁴² The Bishops’ Bible replaced the Great Bible as the official
Bible of the English Church, and in 1571 Convocation decreed that a
copy should be placed in every cathedral, and, where possible, in every
church. This Bible was predominantly printed as a lavish folio, too
expensive for most people to own as their private copy. It is a reasonable
hypothesis therefore, that Shakespeare’s allusions to the Bishops’ version
are drawn primarily from a memory of what he heard in church. The
Geneva Bible by contrast was printed in highly popular quarto, octaro,
and duodecimo formats. These editions numbered the verses and
divided them into separate paragraphs (which made for easier reference
and quotation) and had extensive explanatory notes. The Geneva version
was also the most scholarly translation of any sixteenth-century Bible,
and was popular among not only the godly but with such mainstream
Church of England divines as Richard Hooker and Lancelot Andrewes.
In 1576 a new version of the Geneva New Testament was printed, with
notes based on those by Theodore de Bèze, which had been translated
by Laurence Tomson. The Tomson New Testament swiftly became
extremely popular. The period covered by this book (1592–1604) saw
the printing of fifty editions of the Bible: two Bishops’ Bibles, five
Bishops’ New Testaments, twenty-two Geneva Bibles, twelve Tomson
New Testaments, and nineteen composite Geneva–Tomson Bibles, the
latter composed of the Geneva Old Testament and the Tomson New
Testament bound together.⁴³
As the Geneva Bible was not read in church it seems likely that
Shakespeare’s knowledge of this biblical translation came primarily
from his own reading. The hypothesis that Shakespeare chose to read
the Bible suggests a commitment to its study which might appear
surprising in view of the apparently secular nature of his entire output
(apart from sonnet 146). Naseeb Shaheen has shown, however, that
the extent of Shakespeare’s allusions to parts of the Bible not read
in church indicates that Shakespeare’s private reading of the Bible
was, in fact, the main source of his comprehensive knowledge of it.⁴⁴
Shakespeare also alludes to the Genevan annotations, a part of the Bible
⁴² See Noble, Shakespeare’s Biblical Knowledge, 64–76; Naseeb Shaheen, Biblical

References in Shakespeare’s Plays (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1999), 17–50.
⁴³ See A. S. Herbert, T. H. Darlow, and H. F. Moule, eds., Historical Catalogue of
Printed Editions of the English Bible 1525–1961 (London: The British and Foreign Bible
Society, 1968), 106–23.
⁴⁴ Naseeb Shaheen, ‘Shakespeare’s Knowledge of the Bible—How Acquired’, Shakes-
peare Studies 20 (1988): 210–12.
that would never have been read out in church or passed into proverbial
language.⁴⁵
Shakespeare uses biblical quotation throughout his career, and often
(particularly in his comedies) the allusion functions simply as a brief
joke. For example, Pistol’s description of Falstaff’s sexual appetite—‘He
woos both high and low, both rich and poor, | Both young and old,
one with another’ (The Merry Wives of Windsor, 2. 1. 92–93)—is
much funnier when it is recognized that Falstaff’s indiscriminate lust is
worded so as to recall the universality of the Psalmist’s message: ‘As wel
lowe as high, riche and poore, one with another’ (Psalm 49: 2).⁴⁶ Yet
even where the echo is meant to make the audience laugh it can have a
deeper relation with the action of the play. In The Merchant of Venice
the famous story of Jacob’s gulling of his blind father Isaac is recalled
by the clowning in which Blind Old Gobbo is unable to recognize his
son. Jacob’s trickery in imitating the hairiness of Esau is alluded to and
inverted when Lancelot Gobbo, trying to help his father recognize him,
has Old Gobbo pat his head. The blind father, however, thinking he
is touching his child’s face, wonders whether he has been growing a
beard lately (2. 2). It is a moment of enjoyable slapstick, but it also
brings forward a biblical story which has profound relevance for the
main plot. An impeccably Pauline understanding of the Jacob and Esau
story saw it as an analogue of the transfer of God’s favour away from
his firstborn (Esau or the Jews) to his younger children (Jacob or the
Christians).⁴⁷ The apparently irrelevant comic fooling about hairy faces
has an important and subtle connection with the relations between Jews
and Christians in the main plot.⁴⁸
In the early modern period the Bible was a uniquely holy text, and
the reverence with which it was treated, and the layers of interpretation
which it was subjected to, meant that biblical language carried a
⁴⁵ See Carter, Shakespeare and Holy Scripture, 15; R. A. L. Burnet, ‘Shakespeare and
the Marginalia of the Geneva Bible’, Notes & Queries,  26/2 (1979): 113–14; R. A.
L. Burnet, ‘Some Echoes of the Genevan Bible in Shakespeare and Milton’, Notes &
Queries,  27/2 (1980): 179–81; Roger Stritmatter, ‘The Influence of a Genevan Note
from Romans 7:19 on Shakespeare’s Sonnet 151’, Notes & Queries,  44/4 (1997):
514–16; Roger Stritmatter, ‘By Providence Divine: Shakespeare’s Awareness of Some
Genevan Marginal Notes of I Samuel’, Notes & Queries,  47/1 (2000): 97–100.
⁴⁶ James Sims, Dramatic Uses of Biblical Allusions in Marlowe and Shakespeare
(Gainesville, Fla.: University of Florida Monographs, 1966), 32.
⁴⁷ See Romans 9; Thomas Sutton, Englands First and Second Summons (London: John
Norton, 1633), 172–3.
⁴⁸ See Steven Marx, Shakespeare and the Bible (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2000), 120–4.
fund of powerful associations. This wider interpretative framework
means that single biblical phrases often resonate beyond the immediate
theatrical moment in Shakespeare’s dramaturgy. For example, Hamlet’s
mention of Jephthah—‘O Jephthah, judge of Israel, what a treasure
hadst thou!’ (2. 2. 403)—is clearly a condemnation of Polonius’s
treatment of Ophelia.⁴⁹ However, the story was also read as a fiat
against swearing, and James Black has argued that the allusion to
Jephthah indicates that Hamlet is still subconsciously turning over his
promise to his father’s ghost.⁵⁰ The connective habit of mind central to
Hamlet’s character is illuminated by the fact that the example of parental
cruelty with which he chooses to condemn Polonius was at the centre of
contemporary arguments about the moral valency of swearing. Likewise,
the brief echo of Psalm 137 in Mowbray’s lament of exile (Richard II,
1. 3. 154–7) harnesses the nationalistic fervour of the Psalm, and the
allusion resonates with the play’s larger concerns with nationhood.⁵¹ In
Macbeth the analogy between the main plot and the Old Testament
story of Elisha and Hazael seems to shed light on what Susan Snyder
calls ‘the mystifications of responsibility’ which are crucial to the play.⁵²
The story (2 Kings 8: 7–15) shares with Macbeth the combination of
riddling prophecy and regicide, and the biblical analogue supports a
reading of Shakespeare’s tragedy in which the protagonist is in thrall to
his own susceptibility to evil rather than the power of external agencies.
It is also generally recognized that the biblical allusions in King Lear have
a profound relation to the central concerns of the play. Numerous critics
have argued that King Lear is comparable in its grandeur of conception
⁴⁹ For more on Jephthah in Renaissance drama, see Hamlet, ed. Harold Jenkins,
The Arden Shakespeare (London: Routledge, 1993), 475–7; Debora Kuller Shuger, The
Renaissance Bible: Scholarship, Sacrifice and Subjectivity (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1994), 134–60.
⁵⁰ James Black, ‘Hamlet’s Vows’, Renaissance and Reformation 2/1 (1978): 40–1;
James Black, Edified by the Margent: Shakespeare and the Bible: An Inaugural Professorial
Lecture in the Faculty of Humanities, University of Calgary (Calgary: Faculty of Humanities,
1979), 11–12.
⁵¹ Hannibal Hamlin, ‘Psalm Culture in the English Renaissance: Readings of Psalm
137 by Shakespeare, Spenser, Milton and Others’, Renaissance Quarterly 55 (2002):
246–7. The nationalistic agenda of the Psalm was also recognized by John Awdely in his
jingoistic ballad against ‘all Traytours, Rebels, and papisticall enemies’ which stipulated
‘syng this after the tune of the cxxxvij Psalme’: Claude M. Simpson, The British Broadside
Ballad and its Music (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1966), 585.
⁵² Susan Snyder, ‘Theology as Tragedy in Macbeth’, Christianity and Literature
43/3–4 (1994): 289–300.
and execution, and its treatment of suffering and doubt, with the Book
of Job.⁵³
The currency and status of the Bible made it a uniquely powerful
source, and a brief allusion to a biblical story could open up a fund
of associations, ambiguities, and analogues. The biblical plays of the
late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries are evidence that religious
theatre remained popular with audiences who knew the Bible and could
be expected to connect their knowledge with what they saw on the stage.
Censorship, however, curtailed the overt expression of biblical stories
and language and forced playwrights to approach this popular subject in
subtler and more complex ways. This sublimation of the Bible reached
its zenith in Shakespeare, who harnesses the power of biblical language
and Christian stories and uses them metonymically to express, echo, and
comment upon central themes, ideas, and emotions within the plays.
⁵³ See e.g. Harold Bloom, Ruin the Sacred Truths: Poetry and Belief from the Bible
to the Present (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), 19; Robert Pack,
The Long View: Essays on the Discipline of Hope and Poetic Craft (Amherst: University
of Massachusetts Press, 1991), 251–76; Jan Kott, Shakespeare Our Contemporary, trans.
Boleslaw Taborski (Bristol: Methuen, 1965/1986), 100–33; Peter Milward, Biblical
Influences in Shakespeare’s Great Tragedies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1987), 156–7, 163, 167, 173–4, 177–80, 185, 187, 189, 191, 197; Kenneth Muir,
King Lear: Critical Essays (London: Garland, 1984), 289–90; Marx, Shakespeare and
the Bible, 59–78. In this particular case there is also an intriguing connection in form,
for Job was approached by some sixteenth-century exegetes as a tragedy: see Theodore
de Bèze, Iob expounded by Theodore Beza, partly in manner of a Commentary, partly in
manner of a Paraphrase (London, 1589), A7r , A8r .
2
Shakespeare’s Incarnational Aesthetic:
The Mystery Plays and Catholicism
In the Elizabethan period Protestants and Catholics alike believed that

the old faith persisted because people clung to the faith of their fathers.
Protestants chose to satirize this behaviour as analogous to Jews who
had refused to recognize the Messiah because he embodied a break
with their past. Hugh Latimer argued that Jews ‘would folowe theyr
forefathers (as our papistes are wonte to say)’ and over fifty years later
Thomas Aylesbury likewise suggested that a Jew was ‘somewhat popish
loath to leaue the tradition of his fathers’.¹ This was not simply the
belief of Protestant polemicists, but of Catholics too. Cecily Stonor,
rebuked by judges for her recusancy in Oxford in 1581, believed that
by remaining true to the Catholic church she was keeping faith with the
religion of her upbringing: ‘I was born in such a time when Holy Mass
was in great reverence, and brought up in the same Faith … I hold me
still to that wherein I was born and bred’.² The 1576 proceedings of the
Lord Mayor’s Court in York, which record the explanations recusants
gave for their behaviour, repeatedly testify to the desire to remain, as
Gregory Wilkinson expressed it, ‘in the faith that he was baptized in’.
Isabel Porter declared that ‘she cometh not to the church because her
conscience will not serve her, for things are not in the church as it hath
been aforetime in her forefathers’ days’.³
In the twentieth century a number of historians were unwilling
to believe that pre-Reformation Catholicism could be so persistent.
¹ Hugh Latimer, Certayn Godly Sermons […] (London, 1562), Sv ; Thomas Aylesbury,
The Passion Sermon at Pauls-Crosse; Upon Good-Friday Last, Aprill 7.1626 (London,
1626), 13.
² Henry Clifford, The Life of Jane Dormer, Duchess of Feria (London: Burns & Oates,
1887), 38–9.
³ John Morris, The Troubles of Our Catholic Forefathers: Related by Themselves
(Roehampton: James Stanley, 1872–7), iii. 249–50.
Shakespeare’s Incarnational Aesthetic 27
A. G. Dickens formulated an influential distinction between residual
Catholicism and that inspired by the Counter-Reformation, arguing
that the conservative attachment to the old faith soon declined to
be replaced by the dynamic Catholicism of the Jesuits and seminary
priests: ‘Between survivalism and seminarism little or no connection
existed; arduous proselytism, not the weight of tradition, accounted
for the romanist revival’.⁴ However, the re-evalution of the strength of
medieval Christianity has led likewise to a reappraisal of the continuity
between pre- and post-Reformation Catholicism, and to a recognition
of the accuracy of the contemporary understanding: ‘Separated English
Catholicism was no novel creation of Continental missionaries, but a
logical extension of its immemorial and Marian heritage: the recusant
community which emerged into view a generation after the reign began
neither wholly displaced nor was sharply distinct from the confused
and uncoordinated collection of conservatives that was its predecessor’.⁵
The reassessment of Catholic belief in Elizabethan England has rightly
stressed the importance of residual Catholicism, a Catholicism born out
of affection for the church of people’s childhood—the faith of their
fathers—which was strengthened, rather than created, by the missionary
priests who arrived in the last quarter of the century.
A certain amount of recent research has suggested that Shakespeare
might be one of those who ‘somewhat popish’ was ‘loath to leaue the
tradition of his fathers’. The evidence for Shakespeare’s actual father’s
Catholicism has been eagerly championed by critics anxious to prove
his son’s adherence to the old faith. There are two main pieces of
evidence for John Shakespeare’s religious beliefs, the first being that he
was cited for recusancy, 25 September 1592. Appearance on a recusancy
register proved that the offender was not a regular churchgoer, but
did not prove that the reason for this non-attendance was religious
⁴ A. G. Dickens, ‘The First Stages of Romanist Recusancy in Yorkshire, 1560–1590’,

The Yorkshire Archeaological Journal 35 (1941): 181. See also John Bossy, The English
Catholic Community 1570–1850 (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1975), 4, 106–7,
147–8; J. C. H. Aveling, The Handle and the Axe: The Catholic Recusants in England from
Reformation to Emancipation (London: Blond & Briggs, 1976), 19, 49–50, 52, 60–1.
⁵ Walsham, Church Papists, 95. See also Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars:
Traditional Religion in England c.1400—c.1580 (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1992); Christopher Haigh, ‘The Continuity of Catholicism in the English Reformation’,
in Haigh, ed., The English Reformation Revised (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1987), 176–208; Christopher Haigh, English Reformations: Religion, Politics, and Society
under the Tudors (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993), 251–67: J. J. Scarisbrick, The Reformation
and the English People (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984), 136–61.
28 Shakespeare’s Incarnational Aesthetic
non-conformity.⁶ In John Shakespeare’s case the commissioners seem
to have accepted an alternative explanation. Beside the list containing
his name has been written ‘it is sayd that these laste nine, coom not to
Churche for feare of processe for Debtte’. John Shakespeare’s financial
difficulties during the late 1570s are well documented: he sold off land,
was exempted from payments to the council on which he served, and
was unable to settle debts.⁷ The second piece of evidence which is used
to support the belief that John Shakespeare’s recusancy was caused, or
exacerbated, by doctrinal differences with the established church, is a
document discovered in 1757 known as the Spiritual Last Will and
Testament of John Shakespeare. If genuine, this would indeed prove
that Shakespeare’s father, at least, ‘died a papist’ but there are a number
of question marks surrounding it. When the document was shown to
Malone he had immediate doubts about the handwriting, and after
accepting it as genuine changed his mind and finally repudiated it. It
has since disappeared so cannot be subjected to modern analysis.⁸
John Shakespeare conformed to the Church of England (his children
were baptized in the parish church) but he may nonetheless have been
some form of church papist. The primary relevance to Shakespeare
studies of the new emphasis on Catholic continuity in Elizabethan
England, however, lies not in its specific legacy to the playwright,
but in its general legacy to his generation. The renewed realization
that there was an organic continuity between medieval Christianity
and the sixteenth-century Catholic community has brought forward an
understanding that it was not only those who became recusants who
retained an affection for the old ways. Elizabethan religious policy,
by concerning itself with church attendance rather than the reception
of the sacrament, was specifically formulated to enable and encourage
those who preferred the old faith not to cut themselves off from their
parish church. This successful fostering of conformity, rather than
theological assent, renders ‘almost invisible an indeterminate number
⁶ However, recusancy often ran in families and the appearance of John Shakespeare’s
granddaughter, Susanna, on a recusancy list (6 May 1606) makes the case for Catholicism
in Shakespeare’s family highly plausible: Schoenbaum, William Shakespeare, 234–5.
⁷ Schoenbaum, William Shakespeare, 36–9. Some critics, however, have felt that debt
is an insufficient explanation for John Shakespeare’s withdrawal from public life at this
point, and suggest that it may have been a convenient excuse when he was charged with
Catholicism: Patrick Collinson, Elizabethan Essays (London: Hambledon, 1994), 250.
⁸ Ibid. 41–6. Its probable inauthenticity has recently been established by Robert
Bearman, ‘John Shakespeare’s ‘‘Spiritual Testament’’: A Reappraisal’, Shakespeare Survey
56 (2003), 184–202.
of silent sympathisers of the Old Faith, whose Catholicism was above
all an attitude not an act’.⁹ This new historical perspective opens up a
less sectarian understanding of the Catholic nuances in Shakespeare’s
plays. The acknowledgement that there may be references to ‘creeping
the cross’ in Troilus and Cressida, the Exultet in The Merchant of Venice,
the sprinkling of holy water in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, or the
cloistered life in Twelfth Night need not involve us in the speculation
that Shakespeare spent his youth in a recusant community in Lancashire
or even, as Richard Wilson has suggested, that he considered training
as missionary priest.¹⁰ They may be evidence of nothing more striking
than that Shakespeare, in common with much of his audience, retained
an affection for the old ways.
Shakespeare’s plays are full of Catholic references but their subor-
dination to the passion of his heroines makes it difficult to read them
as conclusive evidence for his own piety. Peter Milward, for example,
argues that the Angelus, which was recited at morning, noon and night,
is recalled when Imogen desires Posthumus: ‘At the sixth hour of morn,
at noon, at midnight, | To encounter me with orisons, for then | I am in
heaven for him’(1. 3. 32–4).¹¹ The slippage that matters here is not so
much that the timing is wrong (the Angelus was said at 6 p.m. not mid-
night) or that this is not, as Milward claims, a parting message (rather
a message that is never imparted (1. 3. 26–7) ), but that Imogen is not
thinking about the Virgin, but about Posthumus. Through her prayers
she hopes to encounter not Mary or God, but her beloved, whom she is
‘in heaven for’. Likewise, it has been argued that Rosalind’s description
of Orlando’s kiss as ‘as full of sanctity as the touch of holy bread’ (As
You Like It, 3. 4. 12–13), would have been ‘inconceivable to anyone
with a Protestant upbringing’.¹² Nonetheless Shakespeare, as with the
example from Cymbeline, is subjecting specifically Catholic practices (if
⁹ Walsham, Church Papists, 91; see also 11–12.

¹⁰ Milward, Shakespeare’s Religious Background, 26; Gary R. Grund, ‘The Fortunate
Fall and Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice’, Studia Neophilologica 55 (1983): 154; Wilson,
Secret Shakespeare, 146–7; Anne Lecercle, ‘Country House, Catholicity and the Crypt(ic)
in Twelfth Night’, in Richard Dutton, Alison Findlay, and Richard Wilson, eds., Region,
Religion and Patronage: Lancastrian Shakespeare (Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 2003), 84–100. For the evidence that creeping the cross lived on in folk memory,
see Ronald Hutton, ‘The English Reformation and the Evidence of Folklore’, Past and
Present 148 (1995): 108–9. For the Lancashire hypothesis, see Honigmann, Shakespeare:
The ‘Lost Years’. For the Douai hypothesis see Wilson, ‘Shakespeare and the Jesuits’.
¹¹ Milward, Shakespeare’s Religious Background, 26.
¹² F. W. Brownlow, ‘John Shakespeare’s Recusancy: New Light on an Old Docu-
ment’, Shakespeare Quarterly 40 (1989): 190. In one of the most delightful pieces of
‘holy bread’ is a reference to blessed bread rather than the eucharist)
to an almost blasphemous pressure through the comparison.¹³ Richard
Wilson describes Portia as one ‘who is accustomed to ‘‘stray about | By
holy crosses, where she kneels and prays’’ for hours, accompanied by
‘‘None but a holy hermit and her maid’’ (5. 1. 30–4)’.¹⁴ But to search
for the relevance of such images in the biography of the playwright,
rather than their action within the play, is to blunt their subtlety. Wilson
has softened the sharp edges of Portia’s piety, glossing over the fact that
this picture is a fiction created to conceal Portia’s disguise as Balthasar.
Portia has not been praying at wayside crosses ‘for happy wedlock
hours’; she has not entrusted her nuptial bliss to God but has secured it
through her own skill by winning the freedom of her husband’s friend
and thus has ensured that Bassanio’s affection can centre exclusively
on herself.
Shakespeare subordinates Catholic imagery to the vagaries of his
plots. In this he is comparable to many other 1590s writers of romantic
poetry who used Catholic tropes freely, not with reverence, but with the
knowledge that they were relics of a discarded religion. Helen Hackett
argues that the 1590s saw a secularized Catholic revival, an occurrence
which Greenblatt attributes to ‘the fifty year effect’: a time in the wake
of the ideological struggle in which the revolutionary generation are
dying out and the survivors look back with a certain longing to the
world that has been lost. Enough time has elapsed for Catholic terms to
feel safe and have both a nostalgic appeal for the older generation, and
novelty value for the younger.¹⁵ Hackett argues that Catholic tropes
survived in both popular and literary culture as images with a colour
and vibrancy which outlived their religious significance. She concludes
that for the Protestant sonneteer Barnaby Barnes, for example, Catholic
imagery enabled him to ‘[have] it all ways: creating that frisson effect
of rubbing up religion—and forbidden religion at that—against sex,
Shakespearean censorship, Warburton changed the phrase ‘holy bread’ to ‘holy beard’
and glossed its meaning as ‘the kiss of charity from hermits and holy men’: The Works of
William Shakespeare, in Eight volumes (Edinburgh, 1795), ii. 60.
¹³ See Michael Davis, ‘‘The Transubstantial Bard: Shakespeare and Catholicism’, in
Douglas Burnham and Enrico Giaccherini, eds., The Poetics of Transubstantiation: From
Theology to Metaphor, Studies in European Cultural Transition (Aldershot: Ashgate,
2005), 39–40.
¹⁴ Wilson, Secret Shakespeare, 254.
¹⁵ Helen Hackett, Virgin Mother, Maiden Queen: Elizabeth I and the Cult of the Virgin
Mary (London: Macmillan, 1995), 161; Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory, 248–9.
while not doing anything that was theologically improper in a Protestant
state’.¹⁶
To some extent the religious language in Shakespeare’s plays does have
a different tenor than that of Barnes’s Parthenophil and Parthenophe,
Spenser’s Amoretti, or Donne’s ‘Songs and Sonnets’. There is a breadth
of reference that goes far beyond the conventional images of saints,
shrines, pilgrimages, and incense, and an engagement which suggests
that, in the plays at least, he is not using the references either as
deconsecrated tropes nor to generate the outrageous and exciting frisson
of the forbidden. There is something almost ordinary and accepted:
the references are part of the furniture of the plays and belong there
in a way that they do not in Barnes, Donne, or even his own sonnets.
The difference is partly due to the genre—many of Shakespeare’s plays
are set in the past and for the characters within them prayers to the
Virgin, requiem masses, and Easter observances are simply part of their
world. Juliet’s evening mass and the chantry chapels of Illyria are treated
with neither reverence nor disdain, but as the props of a story: useful,
colourful, and evocative of a different time and place.
There is circumstantial evidence for church papistry in Shakespeare’s
upbringing but no secure foundation for proving what he himself
believed. The only external evidence that Shakespeare did not conform
to the established church is that there is no record of his name in the
communion token books of St Saviour’s Southwark. Patrick Collinson
and Eamon Duffy have cited this as evidence that he did not receive
and therefore may have been a church papist.¹⁷ However, Jeremy
Boulton, the authority on St Saviour’s communion tokens, states that
only the name of the head of a household would have been recorded in a
communion token book, and therefore had Shakespeare been lodging in
Southwark, his name would not have been recorded whether he received
or not.¹⁸ There is, therefore, no substantive evidence that Shakespeare
did not communicate while he was in London.
Shakespeare’s faith is not provable and a certain equivocation often
lies in attempts to suggest that it is. The riddling argumentative
¹⁶ Helen Hackett, ‘The Art of Blasphemy? Interfusions of the Erotic and Sacred in the
Poetry of Donne, Barnes, and Constable’ (forthcoming). My grateful thanks to Helen
Hackett for sending me a copy of this paper.
¹⁷ Collinson, Elizabethan Essays, 251; Duffy, ‘Was Shakespeare a Catholic?’, 537.
¹⁸ Jeremy Boulton clarified this in personal communication with me, August 2003.
My grateful thanks to him. See also Boulton, ‘The Limits of Formal Religion’, 130–54.
structure of Richard Wilson’s Secret Shakespeare, for example, includes
dubious assertions such as ‘until 1558 Catholicism had, after all, been
the official state religion’ and that ‘the text [of Henry VIII ] seems
to call attention to the fact that … Cardinal Wolsey’s hat was now
worn by his impersonator’.¹⁹ Mutschmann and Wenterdorf ’s attempts
to prove Shakespeare’s Catholicism lead them to the questionable
assertion that ‘the cardinal in Shakespeare’s King John is in no sense
an unworthy figure’.²⁰ Eric Sams’s similar quest likewise provokes the
disingenuous description of John Shakespeare’s Last Will and Testament
as a document ‘once in the possession of Edmund Malone and published
by him as genuine. There is no reason to doubt its authenticity.’²¹
It is important to read the religious engagement of Shakespeare’s
plays and his exploitation of the theatrical and poetic potential of the
old religion in a wider way than simply as evidence of his own doc-
trinal affiliation. The work of historians such as Christopher Haigh,
Alexandra Walsham, J. J. Scarisbrick, and Eamon Duffy has shown
the pervasiveness of unanalysed Catholic habits of mind in conforming
Elizabethans, not simply among recusants. There is an elegiac nostal-
gia in many of Shakespeare’s plays which interacts with the residual
Catholicism present in Elizabethan England as a whole. As Duffy has
expressed it ‘the sensibility which evoked in sonnet 73, ‘‘Bare ruin’d
choirs, where late the sweet birds sang’’, was certainly receptive to
the beauty of the old faith, alert to the tragedy and loss involved in
Reformation’. As Duffy himself has shown, however, such sensitivity
was not confined to Catholics.²² Marotti has well expressed the non-
satiric engagement with magical experience in Shakespeare’s mature
plays, and suggested that: ‘In one sense Shakespeare (like many conser-
vative Protestants) might have been trying to salvage for a post-Catholic
English culture some of those emotionally powerful features of medieval
¹⁹ Wilson, Secret Shakespeare, 6, 262; italics mine. For the evidence that Shakespeare’s
Wolsey was not, in fact, wearing the real thing see John Lee, ‘The Man Who Mistook
His Hat: Stephen Greenblatt and the Anecdote’, Essays in Criticism 45 (1995): 285–300.
²⁰ Mutschmann and Wentersdorf, Shakespeare and Catholicism, 301. Burton Raffel
goes so far as to call him ‘virtuous’: ‘Shakespeare and the Catholic Question’, Religion &
Literature 30/1 (1998): 47.
²¹ Sams, The Real Shakespeare, 32.
²² Duffy, ‘Was Shakespeare a Catholic?, 538; Eamon Duffy, ‘Bare Ruined Choirs:
Remembering Catholicism in Shakespeare’s England’, in Richard Dutton, Alison Findlay,
and Richard Wilson, eds., Theatre and Religion: Lancastrian Shakespeare (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 2003), 42–3, 52–3. See also William Empson, Seven Types
of Ambiguity (London: Penguin, 1995), 21.
Catholicism … participating in a rehabilitation of magic and the visual
that is elaborated in the Stuart Court masque.’²³ Shakespeare’s evocation
of England’s abandoned cultural heritage—church furniture, paintings,
liturgy, and the mystery plays—was available to the playwright and his
audience whether they, or he, were convinced Catholics, lapsed church
papists, or simply Protestants with retentive memories and developed
aesthetic sensibilities.
Much recent historical research has in fact centred precisely on
the way in which aspects of Catholicism were assimilated rather
than destroyed during the English Reformation. Tessa Watt, David
Cressy, Ronald Hutton, and Alexandra Walsham have shown that
many popular forms—such as ballads, wall hangings, and the festal
calendar—concentrated on consensual values and created a synthesis,
rather than a confrontation, between Bible-centred Protestantism and
traditional visual piety.²⁴ These historians focus upon the cheap print
and seasonal celebrations that were intended to entertain and engage
the laity during their leisure time. It is possible that in the theatre
likewise evidence may be found of an assimilation of Catholic practice
which is neither the coded proof of papist playwrights, nor evidence of
a charisma that has been entirely devalued in its transfer to a secular
sphere.
It is, in fact, as theatre that Catholic devotional practices proved most
persistent in the Elizabethan period. The mystery plays were one of
the few aspects of medieval worship which survived the Reformation,
initially at least, relatively unscathed. Plays focusing entirely on Marian
doctrine were abandoned, and nervous justifications were added to non-
scriptural episodes such as the harrowing of hell, but throughout the
country these large-scale civic productions of salvation history focusing
on the life and Passion of Christ were performed well into the Elizabethan
period. The plays are also often preserved in strikingly late manuscripts.
Recent research has suggested that the Towneley manuscript was copied
during Mary’s reign and all six surviving manuscripts of the complete
²³ Arthur F. Marotti, ‘Shakespeare and Catholicism’, in Richard Dutton, Alison Find-

lay, and Richard Wilson, eds., Theatre and Religion: Lancastrian Shakespeare (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 2003), 230, 232. See also Greenblatt, Will in the World,
112–13.
²⁴ See David Cressy, Bonfires and Bells: National Memory and the Protestant Calendar in
Elizabethan and Stuart England (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1989); Watt, Cheap
Print, 324–8 and passim; Hutton, ‘The English Reformation’, 89–116; Alexandra
Walsham, Providence in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999),
3–5 and passim.
Chester cycle were copied after 1590.²⁵ A number of critics have argued
that these plays are not merely anachronistic texts that happen to survive
into the sixteenth century but an integral part of late medieval and early
modern religious life. Lawrence Clopper has suggested, for example,
that the medieval Chester play was predominantly a Passion play, and
the content, shape, and techniques of production which we associate
with the Chester cycle are in fact a sixteenth-century phenomenon.²⁶
Throughout the country mystery plays survived into Elizabeth’s
reign, the first decade of which saw Corpus Christi pageants acted in
at least Newcastle, New Romney, Norwich, Worcester, Chelmsford,
Malden, Braintree, Bungay, Chester, Coventry, York, Dublin, and
Cornwall. Lincoln’s Corpus Christi plays, which had been revived
under Mary, were replaced by a play about Tobias, which reused
the ‘gear’ of the old plays.²⁷ The York pageants were not suppressed
until 1569, and in 1579 the ‘house books’ record the city’s decision
‘that Corpus Christi play shalbe played this yere’ but Archbishop
Grindal seems to have impounded the play text that was sent to
him for approval.²⁸ Chester’s final performance is not until 1575.
The pageants at Durham and Doncaster were acted until 1576 and
Tewkesbury accounts mention payment for ‘six sheep-skins for Christ’s
garments’ in 1578. Kendal, and probably Preston too, had cycles which
lasted into James’s reign—perhaps until around 1605.²⁹ Religious
drama was still popular in the provinces in the 1570s and 1580s and
²⁵ Barbara D. Palmer, ‘Recycling ‘‘The Wakefield Cycle’’: The Records’, Research

Opportunities in Renaissance Drama 41 (2000): 96; David Mills, ‘The Chester Cycle’,
in Richard Beadle, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Theatre (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2001), 110; Peter Happé, Cyclic Form and the English
Mystery Plays: A Comparative Study of the English Biblical Cycles and Their Continental
and Iconographic Counterparts (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004), 240.
²⁶ Gail McMurray Gibson, The Theatre of Devotion: East Anglian Drama and Society
in the Late Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 2; Lawrence M.
Clopper, ‘The History and Development of the Chester Cycle’, Modern Philology 75
(1978): 231; Lawrence M. Clopper, ‘English Drama: From Ungodly Ludi to Sacred
Play’, in David Wallace, ed., The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 750–1.
²⁷ Other Corpus Christi pageants known to have survived the Reformation include
Aberdeen, Beverley, Canterbury, Hereford, Kingston-on-Thames, Louth, Manningtree,
Morebath, Reading, and Tewkesbury: E. K. Chambers, Mediaeval Stage (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1903/63), ii. 329–406.
²⁸ Alexandra F. Johnston and Margaret Rogerson, eds., York, Records of Early English
Drama (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1979), 355–6, 390.
²⁹ Chambers, Mediaeval Stage, ii. 396; Audrey Douglas and Peter Greenfield, eds.,
Cumberland Westmorland Gloucestershire, Records of Early English Drama (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 1986), 17–19.
the post-Reformation genesis of a Corpus Christi play at Sherborne,
in Dorset, shows that the form was not simply dying slowly, but
was sufficiently vibrant to spring up in new places.³⁰ There is also
the aforementioned case of Thomas Ashton’s 1560 Passion play and
Shrewsbury school’s other performances of religious subjects. In 1567–8
the records state that tradespeople were willing to give financial support
to this ‘greate playe’, a civic sponsorship which suggests interesting
correlations with the cycle drama.³¹
When, however, by the mid-Jacobean period, the cycle plays were
entirely suppressed, their memory lived on. John Shaw’s record of an
old man whom he catechized during the Civil War, unwittingly reveals
the dramatic power of the mystery plays:
I asked him, How many Gods there were? he said, he knew not: I informing
him, asked him again: how he tho’t to be saved? he answered, he could not tell
yet tho’t that was a hard question than the other, I told him yat the way to
Salvation was by Iesus Christ God-man, who as he was man shed his blood for
us on the crosse etc Oh, Sir (said he) I think I heard of that man you speake of,
once in a play at Kendall, called Corpus-Christi play, where there was a man on
a tree, & blood ran downe.³²
In 1644 the memory of a play suppressed in 1605 is still vivid, and
the visual power of red, streaming blood is present to the old man in
a more tangible way than the preacher’s commonplace formulation of
salvation through the blood of Christ. The memory of the mysteries was
retained by educated, Protestant men as well, such as the Lancashire-
born John Weever (1576–1632). Weever’s Ancient Funeral Monuments
(1631) is caught between the author’s Protestantism (one chapter extols
the abolition of the pope’s ‘exorbitant authoritie’) and his instinctive
desire to preserve and value the past. Recording the tomb inscription of
Richard Marlow, he explains:
This Marlow was Lord Maior in the yeare 1409. in whose Maioralitie there was
a play at Skinners Hall, which lasted eight dayes (saith Stow) to heare which,
most the greatest Estates of England were present. The Subiect of the play was
the sacred Scriptures, from the creation of the world: They call this, Corpus
³⁰ Peter Greenfield, ‘Regional Performance in Shakespeare’s Time’, in Alison Findlay,

Richard Wilson, and Richard Dutton, eds., Region, Religion and Patronage: Lancastrian
Shakespeare (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 245 and passim.
³¹ Collinson, ‘The Shearman’s Tree’, 218.
³² Douglas, Cumberland Westmorland Gloucestershire, 219. See also Helen Cooper,
‘Blood Running Down’, London Review of Books 23/15 (2001): 13–14.
Christi Play in my countrey, which I haue seene acted at Preston, and Lancaster,
and last of all at Kendall, in the beginning of the raigne of King Iames.³³
If people alive in the 1630s and 1640s were eyewitnesses of the Corpus
Christi plays (in Weever’s case, three of them) it seems at least plausible
that many Londoners would have known them a generation earlier.
Mystery plays, as Weever testifies, had been performed in London
before the Reformation and Henry Machyn’s diary for 1557 records
a Marian Passion play, ‘the vij day of Juin. begane a stage play at the
Grey freers of the Passyon of Cryst’. According to Prynne a Passion
play was also performed in London in the early seventeenth century,
at which ‘there were thousands present’.³⁴ More importantly, perhaps,
London was the focus of internal migration in England, and despite its
high number of deaths and low birth rate the population of London
grew from 60,000 in the beginning of the sixteenth century to 575,000
by the end of the seventeenth. The levels of migration to London in
this period, much of it from northern England, means that many of
those going to see Shakespeare’s plays would have had their theatrical
expectations shaped by provincial religious drama.³⁵
Shakespeare, an immigrant from rural Warwickshire, is one specific
example of someone who may have taken with him to London the
memory of mystery plays performed in his home county.³⁶ Only
fourteen miles from Stratford-upon-Avon was staged the most famous
and popular mystery cycle in Tudor England: the Coventry cycle.
This cycle remained an important annual event until 1579; its demise
signalled by the single sentence in the City Annals, April 1580: ‘and
³³ John Weever, Ancient Fvnerall Monvments […] (London, 1631), Mm5r .

³⁴ Diary of Henry Machyn, 138; Chambers, Mediaeval Stage, ii. 379–82; Miri Rubin,
Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1991), 229–32, 275–82.
³⁵ C. G. A. Clay, Economic Expansion and Social Change: England 1500–1700
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), i. 27, 197, 210; E. A. Wrigley and
R. S. Schofield, The Population Histories of England 1541–1871: A Reconstruction
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 166, 467. Helen Cooper has argued
that the ‘dominant living theatrical experience’ for the audience of the 1590s was the cycle
plays: ‘Shakespeare and the Mystery Plays’, in Stuart Gillespie and Neil Rhodes, eds.,
Shakespeare and Elizabethan Popular Culture, Arden Shakespeare (London: Thomson
Learning, 2006), 24. My grateful thanks to Helen Cooper for giving me a copy of this
piece at an earlier stage.
³⁶ Another early-modern dramatist, Thomas Heywood, seems also to have been aware
of the mystery plays and his Apology for Actors stated that pageants were still flourishing
among Catholics and in the north: Thomas Heywood, An Apology for Actors (London,
1612), E4r , G3r .
this yeare the padgins were layd downe’.³⁷ The excitement generated by
cycle plays, even in the Elizabethan era, is demonstrated by the distances
people were willing to travel to see them, such as the Shropshire man
who went to Chester in 1577 because ‘he heard of the plays [t]here’.³⁸
It seems highly likely, therefore, that a young man interested in theatre
would have travelled the short road between Stratford and Coventry to
see the most famous dramatic presentation of his day, and Shakespeare
could have seen the Coventry cycle at any time up to his fifteenth year.
The Coventry cycle’s popularity in the Tudor period is attested by
the number of contemporary references to it. The earliest is the jestbook
account of an unlearned Warwickshire village priest who preached on
the articles of the Creed, and told his congregation: ‘yf you beleue not
me, then for a more suerte & suffycyent auctoryte, go your way to
couentre, and there ye shall se them all played in corpus cristi playe’.³⁹
John Heywood’s The Foure PP (1547), although it was not written for
a Coventry audience, nonetheless chooses the Coventry Harrowing of
Hell play to make a joke about a devil acting in a play. The character
who goes down to hell recognizes the porter as ‘oft in the play of Corpus
Cristi | He had played the deuyll at Couentry’.⁴⁰ It is also a Coventry
weaver, John Careless, who, according to Foxe, is released from his
imprisonment in 1556 ‘to play in the Pageant about the City’.⁴¹ As
³⁷ R. W. Ingram, ed., Coventry, Records of Early English Drama (Manchester:

Manchester University Press, 1981), 294; Lawrence M. Clopper, Drama, Play, and
Game: English Festive Culture in the Medieval and Early Modern Period (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2001), 282, 293.
³⁸ A. L. Beier, Masterless Men: The Vagrancy Problem in England 1560–1640 (London:
Methuen, 1987), 75.
³⁹ Leonard R. N. Ashley, ed., Shakespeare’s Jest book: An edition of A Hundred Mery
Talys (1526) edited in 1866 by Hermann Oesterley: A Facsimile Reproduction (Gainesville,
Fla.: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1970), 100. It has been inferred from this that
Coventry was a Creed play: Alexandra F. Johnston, ‘What if No Texts Survived? External
Evidence for Early English Drama’, in Marianne G. Briscoe and John C. Coldewey,
eds., Contexts for Early English Drama (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989),
11; Margaret Rogerson, ‘The Coventry Corpus Christi Play: A ‘‘Lost’’ Middle English
Creed Play?’, Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama 36 (1999): 143–78. Despite
being an interesting possibility, this seems an over-literal interpretation of the jest as any
mystery cycle performs the Christian story and therefore would ‘verify’ the creed. Also
the extant pageants from the Coventry cycle dramatize events—such as the Presentation
at the Temple, the slaughter of the innocents, and Isaiah’s prophecies—that are not in
the creed.
⁴⁰ John Heywood, The Foure PP, in Specimens of the Pre-Shakespearean Drama, ed.
John Matthews Manly (New York: Biblo & Tannen, 1967), 509–10.
⁴¹ This is a particularly interesting anecdote as it is an example of Protestantism’s
initial enthusiasm for biblical theatre and the non-sectarian attitude towards the mystery
late as 1656 Sir William Dugdale reported that ‘I have been told by
some old people, who in their younger years were eye-witnesses of these
Pageants so acted, that the yearly confluence of people to see the shew
was extraordinary great, and yeilded no small advantage to this City’.⁴²
Unfortunately for the study of the possible influence of this famous
theatrical event on Shakespeare, almost all the Coventry cycle has been
lost. Only two plays survive: the Shearmen and Taylors’ Nativity pageant,
and the Weavers’ pageant, which is about Christ’s childhood—his
Presentation and his discussion with the doctors in the Temple. The
records also give evidence for the staging of the Passion by the Smiths,
the Harrowing of Hell and Resurrection by the Cappers, and a Doomsday
play by the Drapers. There is also some evidence that the Deposition
was performed by the Pinners and Needlers, and the Assumption by
the Mercers. Traditionally it has been thought that there were ten
pageants performed in total, and it has been assumed that the pageants
which are unaccounted for enacted the Old Testament subjects and
Jesus’ ministry, hence creating a cycle similar in scope to those in York,
Chester, Beverley, and Cornwall.⁴³ This has been questioned recently
by Margaret Rogerson, who has suggested that the two pageants may be
relics of a creed play rather than a scriptural sequence, and by Lawrence
Clopper, who conjectures that Coventry’s cycle may have centred on
the Passion.⁴⁴
Whatever the exact form the Coventry cycle took it is widely accepted
that it is at least probable that Shakespeare caught the local expression
of England’s rich heritage of civic religious drama.⁴⁵ Although the
plays which enabled the Protestant weaver and the Catholic authorities to co-operate in
ensuring the performance of the cycle: Foxe, Actes and Monuments, ii. 1920.
⁴² William Dugdale, The Antiquities of Warwickshire, illustrated from records, leiger-
bookes, manuscripts, charters, evidences, tombes and armes: beautifed with maps, prospects
and portraitures (London, 1656), 116. On the importance of the cycle to Coventry
see also Charles Phythian-Adams, ‘Ceremony and the Citizen: The Communal Year at
Coventry 1450–1550’, in Peter Clark and Paul Slack, eds., Crisis and Order in English
Towns 1500–1700: Essays in Urban History (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972),
57–85.
⁴³ Hardin Craig, English Religious Drama of the Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1955), 286–92; Clifford Davidson, ‘Civic Drama for Corpus Christi
at Coventry: Some Lost Plays’, in Alan E. Knight, ed., The Stage as Mirror: Civic Theatre
in Late Medieval Europe (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1997), 145.
⁴⁴ Rogerson, ‘The Coventry Corpus Christi Play’, 143–78; Clopper, Drama, Play,
and Game, 173.
⁴⁵ Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars, 582; Collinson, Elizabethan Essays, 225. See also
Clifford Davidson, ‘ ‘‘What hempen home-spuns have we swagg’ring here?’’ Amateur
cycle was suppressed in 1579, certain members of the community were
still agitating for its revival in the 1590s. In 1591 Coventry’s council
recorded that ‘it is also agreed by the whole consent of this house that the
distrucion of Ierusalem the conquest of the Dans or the historie of KE
the 4 … shalbe plaid on the pagens … & non other playes’. As Ingram
notes, the codicil ‘& non other playes’ sounds as though the council
still feels the need in the early 1590s to curb the idea that the mysteries
might be revived.⁴⁶ The guilds were certainly tenacious in retaining their
costumes and props. A 1591 inventory of the Coventry Cappers’ props
includes ‘pylates dublit … the spirate of godes cote gods cotes and the
hose pylats heade fyve maries heades … mary maudlyns gowne … gods
head the spirites heade … pylates clubbe hell mowth … adams spade’.⁴⁷
This determined retention of the physical accoutrements of the Corpus
Christi plays is an objective correlative to the mental tenacity of those
who in the 1630s and 1640s still remembered the biblical drama of
their youth, and it also bears comparison with the widespread refusal to
destroy vestments, mass books, and chalices which likewise accompanied
the Reformation. One pious optimist, for example, bequeathed gold
candlesticks to the church in Edmonton, Middlesex, in 1570, ‘should
mass ever be said there again’.⁴⁸ The mystery plays, like the mass, had
been a powerful spectacle, and the memory of both remained in many
early-modern minds.
Emrys Jones has suggested that however enthusiastically Protestant-
ism was embraced, inward mental habits and unanalysed assumptions
which were part of the older order would have been unconsciously
retained for many years. He has argued that when Shakespeare came
to write plays of a historical or tragic kind, he had the Passion plays of
his boyhood as a dramatic paradigm and that the two tetralogies form
a secular cycle inspired by the Coventry performance of scriptural his-
tory.⁴⁹ The strongest evidence that Shakespeare saw, and remembered,
Actors in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the Coventry Civic Plays and Pageants’,
Shakespeare Studies 19 (1987): 87–100.
⁴⁶ Ingram, Coventry, 332. Three songs were added to the Shearmen and Taylors’
pageant in 1591 presumably in expectation of a revival: Thomas Sharp, A Dissertation
on the Pageants or Dramatic Mysteries Anciently performed at Coventry […] (Coventry,
1825), 113; Chambers, Mediaeval Stage, ii. 422.
⁴⁷ Ingram, Coventry, 334.
⁴⁸ Scarisbrick, The Reformation and the English People, 141. See also Haigh, English
Reformations, 252–3.
⁴⁹ Emrys Jones, The Origins of Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977),
33–4, 51.
the mysteries is that a number of the scenes and characters in his plays
seem to echo those found in the cycle drama. Most conspicuously, his
explicit references to biblical characters often seem to have been inspired
by the dramatic spectacles of his youth rather than the Bible reading
of his adulthood. The most famous example of this is Hamlet’s com-
plaint—‘I would have such a fellow whipped for o’erdoing Termagant.
It out-Herods Herod’ (3. 2. 13–14)—which, by connecting Herod
with boisterous overacting, indicates that Shakespeare is thinking of a
dramatic presentation of the biblical character. Likewise Falstaff ’s letter
in The Merry Wives of Windsor causes Mistress Page to exclaim ‘what a
Herod of Jewry is this!’ (2. 1. 19–21), because Falstaff ’s jigging verses,
absurd boasts, and sartorial excesses recall the strutting, ranting Herod
of the mystery plays.⁵⁰ Henry V ’s graphic description of the slaughter
of the innocents (‘mad mothers with their howls confused | Do break
the clouds, as did the wives of Jewry’ (3. 3. 122–3) ) likewise appears to
derive less from Scripture, which refers only to the single voice of Rachel
mourning for her children, than from the communal grief staged in
the Coventry cycle: ‘who hard eyuer soche a cry | Of wemen that there
chyldur haue lost’ (1. 870–1).⁵¹
There is one suggestive correspondence with the mystery plays which
is a rare example of a possible verbal echo. Shakespeare makes two
explicit references to Judas greeting Jesus at the moment of betrayal
with an ‘All hail!’:
   Witness the loving kiss I give the fruit.
He kisses the infant prince
[Aside] To say the truth, so Judas kissed his master,
And cried ‘All hail!’ whenas he meant all harm.
(3 Henry VI 5. 7. 32–4)
⁵⁰ Diana Whaley, ‘Voices from the Past: A Note on Termagant and Herod’, in Tom
Cain, Claire Lamont, and John Batchelor, eds., Shakespearean Continuities: Essays in
Honour of E. A. J. Honigmann (London: Macmillan, 1997), 24–8; Michael O’Connell,
‘Vital Cultural Practices: Shakespeare and the Mysteries’, Journal of Medieval and Early
Modern Studies 29/1 (1999): 157–9; Jonathan Gil Harris, ‘ ‘‘Look not big, nor stamp,
nor stare’’: Acting Up in The Taming of the Shrew, and the Coventry Herod Plays’,
Comparative Drama 34/4 (2000–1): 375.
⁵¹ Harris, ‘ ‘‘Look not big, nor stamp, nor stare’’ ’, 376. For further examples of
the influence of the Coventry cycle on Shakespeare, see Irvin Leigh Matus, ‘An Early
Reference to the Coventry Mystery Plays in Shakespeare?’, Shakespeare Quarterly 40/2
(1989): 196–7; Cherrell Guilfoyle, Shakespeare’s Play within Play: Medieval Imagery and
Scenic Form in Hamlet, Othello and King Lear (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Medieval Institute
Publications, 1990), 85–9; Naomi Conn Liebler, ‘Shakespeare’s Medieval Husbandry:
Cain and Abel, Richard II, and Brudermond’, Mediaevalia 18 (1995): 452–6.
  Did they not sometime cry ‘All hail!’ to me?
So Judas did to Christ.
(Richard II 4. 1. 160–1)
This phrase does not originate with the Bible, for in all sixteenth-century
versions Judas greets Jesus with a simple ‘Hail’. It has therefore been
argued that the phrase comes instead from the mystery plays, for in the
York Agony and Betrayal Judas greets Jesus with an ‘All hayll’ (28. 248).
As the Coventry play of the betrayal is not extant it may well be that
Shakespeare is remembering a similar ‘All hail’ from the geographically
closer cycle.⁵²
Shakespeare’s debt to the mystery cycles is, however, to a large extent
unrecoverable at a verbal level. This is partly because most of the text of
the Coventry cycle is lost. More fundamentally, however, it is because
Shakespeare’s debt to the earlier drama does not lie at the level of text.
Drama is an embodied art form, and at the centre of the mysteries
is the Incarnation; the cycle plays acted out the enfleshment of the
Godhead. This centrality of the body is something that Shakespearean
drama shares.⁵³ The strongest evidence that Shakespeare was influenced
by the mysteries is found not in the words of his characters but in his
embodiment of concepts and the shaping of his scenes. Throughout his
career Shakespeare’s scenes repeatedly recall mystery play staging and
secular situations find an echo in sacred stories. Michael O’Connell
argues that this is the specific legacy of medieval religious drama in
Shakespeare:
The pressure—moral, affective, and intellectual—of dozens of scenes both
comic and tragic drawn from a history still considered sacred. It is this specific
legacy that we need to know about more and that we need to ponder more
attentively as we write and read about the blinding of Gloucester, the killing of
Macduff ’s children, the jealousy of Leontes.⁵⁴
⁵² Shaheen, Biblical References in Shakespeare’s Plays, 335–6. This expression is linked

with Judas in many other texts of the period: Edmond Ironside; and Anthony Brewer’s
The Love-Sicke King, ed. Martin Randall (London: Garland, 1991), 5. 1. 29–31; Samuel
Rowlands, The Betraying of Christ (London, 1598), B4r , C4r ; A Letter written out
of England to an English Gentleman remaining at Padua […] (London, 1599), B2r .
Shakespeare, therefore, may simply be showing knowledge of a widely used phrase that
had entered the language through the mystery plays. However, this, in itself, would be
highly suggestive for a study of the effect of the cycle plays on Renaissance drama.
⁵³ See Pauline Kiernan, Shakespeare’s Theory of Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1996).
⁵⁴ Michael O’Connell, ‘God’s Body: Incarnation, Physical Embodiment, and the Fate
of Biblical Theater in the Sixteenth Century’, in David G. Allen and Robert A. White,
The first (and one of the best) pieces of such criticism was Glynne
Wickham’s argument for the influence on Macbeth of the mystery play
staging of the harrowing of hell and the massacre of the innocents.⁵⁵
Wickham draws attention to some specific correspondences (such as the
knocking on the gate, the allusion to a ‘devil porter’, and the arrival
of a ghostly figure during a banquet) which connect Macbeth with the
embodiment of evil in the earlier drama. While Macbeth is not reduced
to a ‘type’ of Satan or Herod, his degeneracy is clearly signalled by the
parallels.
Correspondences have likewise been found in the Henry VI plays,
and Emrys Jones has suggested that Humphrey’s fall in 2 Henry VI and
the death of York in 3 Henry VI are both shaped by the mystery play
staging of the Passion.⁵⁶ John D. Cox has extended Jones’s work and
argued that York’s occupation of Henry’s throne at the beginning of 3
Henry VI is a dramaturgical and visual allusion to Lucifer’s occupation
of God’s throne at the beginning of the mysteries.⁵⁷ The opening of
King Lear may likewise recall an inverted Fall of Lucifer in which
the angelic characters are cast out and the demonic characters given
the throne.⁵⁸ In these plays it seems that Shakespeare is remembering
the cycles’ powerful commencement which displays God’s omnipotence
and justice. By giving King Lear and 3 Henry VI an opening scene in
which the expected order is inverted, Shakespeare signals not only the
individual ineptitude of the kings concerned, but indicates that this
weakness will have repercussions for the whole kingdom.
One of the most persuasive recent connections between Shakespeare’s
dramaturgy and the mystery plays is the suggestion that Mary’s preg-
nancy is the model for Shakespeare’s inversion of the classic fabliau
in which the cuckolded husband’s jealousy is well founded. Through-
out Shakespeare (for example, in The Merry Wives of Windsor, Much
Ado about Nothing, Othello, Cymbeline, and The Winter’s Tale) hus-
bands’ apprehensions about their wives’ chastity proves to be mistaken.
Shakespeare may have found a powerful dramatic antecedent for this
eds., Subjects on the World’s Stage: Essays on British Literature of the Middle Ages and the
Renaissance (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1995), 81–2.
⁵⁵ Glynne Wickham, Shakespeare’s Dramatic Heritage: Collected Studies in Mediaeval,
Tudor and Shakespearean Drama (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969), 214–31.
⁵⁶ Jones, Origins, 38–52.
⁵⁷ John D. Cox, Shakespeare and the Dramaturgy of Power (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1989), 82–103.
⁵⁸ Guilfoyle, Shakespeare’s Play within a Play, 113.
reversal in the mystery play dramatization of Joseph’s doubts about
Mary’s fidelity—as occur, for example, in the N-town play Joseph’s
Doubt. The sanctity of Shakespeare’s portrayal of many of these injured
women (such as Desdemona and Imogen) lends weight to the corres-
pondence, and the visual impact of Hermione’s heavily pregnant body
would have made the connection especially close in her case.⁵⁹
The correspondences between Elizabethan and medieval drama, how-
ever, are far more widespread than such specific examples can show.
Critics have suggested, for example, that many of the physical aspects of
early-modern theatre—such as the thrust stage and the organization of
the audience—retain aspects of mystery play staging.⁶⁰ These physical
connections may preserve some of the valency of the medieval stage
and the connection between Shakespearean drama and the mystery
plays lies deeper than verbal connections, character types, or parallel
scenes, although it is only through such connections that the particular
relation of his plays with the earlier English drama can be established,
and the meaning of the correspondences understood. The body of
this book, therefore, will consider the previously unrecognized debt of
specific scenes to the mystery plays, as well as to the Bible and Christian
doctrine, but the rest of this chapter will consider some of the wider
contexts for this work and the ways in which early-modern drama is the
inheritor of the mystery plays.
The dramatic theory available to early modern dramatists belonged
not to their native productions, but to classical drama. Such prescrip-
tions, enthusiastically supported by English theorists such as Sidney,
taught that plays had to abide by certain rules and that decorum should
be observed in the segregation of genre and classes of characters, unity
of action, and the absence of staged violence. Among the decorums
which Sidney famously valued, and Shakespeare famously violated, was
Aristotle’s unity of action, which became the unities of time and place
in Renaissance dramatic theory:
⁵⁹ Michael O’Connell, ‘Vital Cultural Practices’, 161–2.

⁶⁰ Pamela M. King and Clifford Davidson, eds., The Coventry Corpus Christi Plays
(Kalamazoo, Mich.: Medieval Institute Publications, 2000), 12; Glynne Wickham, Early
English Stages 1300–1660 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1959), ii. 37; Cooper,
‘Shakespeare and the Mystery Plays’, 26–7. For the argument that the valency of
the Elizabethan stage’s space was affected by medieval staging, see Robert Weimann,
Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theatre: Studies in the Social Dimension
of Dramatic Form and Function (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978),
73–85, 224–46.
The stage should always represent but one place, and the uttermost time
presupposed in it should be, both by Aristotle’s precept and common reason,
but one day … [in most plays, however,] you shall have Asia of the one side, and
Afric of the other … . Now, of time they are much more liberal: for ordinary it
is that two young princes fall in love; after many traverses, she is got with child,
delivered of a fair boy; he is lost, groweth a man, falls in love, and is ready to
get another child; and all this in two hours’ space.⁶¹
When Jonson revised Every Man in his Humour for his 1616 Folio
he added a prologue that promised this play would not ‘make a child,
now swadled, to proceede | Man, and then shoote vp, in one beard,
and weede, | Past threescore yeeres’. The prologue is a jibe levelled at
Shakespeare as the lines about ‘Yorke, and Lancasters long iarres’ and
more particularly a ‘Chorus’ that ‘wafts you ore the seas’ makes clear.⁶² In
The Magnetic Lady (1632) Jonson extended his critique of old-fashioned
drama:
a child could be born, in a play, and grow up to a man i’the first scene, before
he went off the stage: and then after to come forth a squire, and be made a
knight: and that knight to travel between the Acts, and do wonders i’the Holy
Land, or elsewhere; kill paynims, wild boars, dun cows, and other monsters;
beget him a reputation, and marry an emperor’s daughter for his mistress;
convert her father’s country; and at last come home, lame, and all-to-beladen
with miracles.⁶³
The killing of a dun cow was an exploit of Guy of Warwick and
considering Jonson’s rivalry with the Warwickshire playwright, it seems
likely that he is once more making Shakespeare his target. However,
the word ‘miracles’, which is repeated three times in the next three lines
along with other words connected with anti-Catholic satire—‘juggle’
and ‘Hocus Pocus’—suggests that the old Catholic drama was also the
subject of Jonson’s lampoon.⁶⁴
It is suggestive that Jonson’s satire may encompass both
Shakespearean and medieval drama. His complaints register his
⁶¹ Sir Philip Sidney: A Critical Edition of the Major Works, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 243.
⁶² Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford, Percy Simpson, and Evelyn Simpson, 11 vols.
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1925–52), iii. prologue, 7–9, 11, 15.
⁶³ Ben Jonson, vi. 1 chorus, 16–24.
⁶⁴ For the connection of ‘juggling’ with anti-Catholic satire, see Marie Axton, ed.,
Three Tudor Classical Interludes: Thersites, Jacke Jugeler, Horestes (Cambridge: D. S.
Brewer, 1982), 19–20. ‘Hocus Pocus’ was an early seventeenth-century name for a
juggler and assumed to be a corruption of the words of the Latin Mass ‘Hoc est corpus’:
The Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. hocus pocus.
increasing exasperation with the popularity of that ‘mouldy tale’ Pericles
in particular—Shakespeare’s most disunified play.⁶⁵ Pericles is in fact
not only close to medieval religious romances in form, but shares a
major aspect of its plot with the King of Marcylle episode in the
fifteenth-century play Mary Magdalene. However, Peter Womack has
shown that this is not because Mary Magdalene influenced Pericles, but
that the source of Pericles influenced the source of Mary Magdalene.
Womack’s argument here is not only persuasive for the specific case he
cites—that Confessio Amantis is the real origin of this episode—but for
the wider point he is making:
So if, as has more than once been suggested, Pericles is a Jacobean miracle play in
secular disguise, there is more to the conjunction than a biographical collision,
such as the hypothesis that Shakespeare was a crypto-Catholic, or that he had
seen a fugitive saint play in his youth. The point is rather that romance and
miracle are separable but not separate manifestations of a common repertoire of
plots and plot devices … Sidney’s implicit program can be seen in this context as
a strategy for decatholicizing the theater … by insisting on a single stage world,
he effectively calls for a secularised theater, devoid of heaven, hell, theophany
and magic.⁶⁶
Romance was not only written in the Catholic past, it was also a Catholic
form.
Jonson’s critique is part of the humanist attack on the implausibility
of romance, begun by men such as Sir Thomas More.⁶⁷ This critique
was perpetuated by Protestant Elizabethans such as Roger Ascham, and
it began to assume an anti-Catholic edge. Roger Ascham’s attack on
romance is situated within an argument against travel to Catholic Italy:
‘In our forefathers tyme, whan Papistrie … couered and ouerflowed all
England, fewe bookes were read in our tong, sauyng certaine bookes
of Cheualrie, as they sayd, for pastime and pleasure, which, as some
say, were made in Monasteries, by idle Monkes, or wanton Chanons:
⁶⁵ Ben Jonson, vi. 492.

⁶⁶ Peter Womack, ‘Shakespeare and the Sea of Stories’, Journal of Medieval and Early
Modern Studies 29/1 (1999): 169–77. For a more confessional argument about romance
as a Catholic form, and its connection with Shakespeare, see Richmond, Shakespeare,
Catholicism, and Romance.
⁶⁷ Thomas More, The Latin Epigrams of Thomas More, ed. and trans. Leicester Bradner
and Charles Arthur Lynch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), epigram 174.
See also Robert P. Adams, ‘Bold Bawdry and Open Manslaughter: The English New
Humanist Attack on Medieval Romance’, Huntington Library Quarterly 23 (1959–60):
33–48.
as one example, Morte Arthure’.⁶⁸ The polemic of Protestants such as
Ascham and Sidney highlighted what they perceived as Catholic stylistic
methods in English writing and dramaturgy.
Classical decorum celebrated by the humanists likewise decreed that
there should be separation of rank along generic boundaries: tragedy
belonged to high-class characters, comedy to low.⁶⁹ Sidney disapproves
of the ‘mingling of kings and clowns’, a device ubiquitous to both
medieval and early-modern drama.⁷⁰ The mystery plays enthusiastically
mixed high-seriousness with comic play and low characters with the
tragic protagonists. The domestic concerns and comedy of Noah’s wife,
Mary’s midwives, or old Joseph doubting his young bride’s fidelity are
mingled with the recounting of God’s salvation of the world. Even
the climax of the tragedy, the Crucifixion, is played out by workmen
who joke about the torture they commit as if it were a game. These
characters, however amusing or disturbing, might seem incidental to the
dramatic project of the mysteries, perhaps brought on simply to please
the crowd, but in fact they are inherent to a theatrical enterprise which
dramatizes the Incarnation. The central character of the mystery cycles
imploded the classical decorum which separated high and low. The
rustic carpenter, who is also the architect of the universe, is at one and
the same time king and clown. The social fluidity of the Corpus Christi
drama as a whole has this central indecorum as its source. The genre
of the mysteries is likewise mixed by definition: the Crucifixion was
the greatest tragedy, leading to the most profound comedy, of Western
culture. Any cycle that staged both the Crucifixion and the Resurrection
could never aim to disentangle the tragic from the comic.
George Whetstone’s dedicatory epistle to Promos and Cassandra
(1578) is a forthright denunciation of popular dramaturgy and Whet-
stone is probably thinking of mystery plays as the primary abusers of
⁶⁸ Roger Ascham, The Scholemaster, ed. John E. B. Mayor (London: Bell & Sons,
1892), 135. My thanks to the members of the Oxford Tudor reading group, and Fred
Schurink in particular, for a stimulating discussion of this passage. See also Nashe’s
complaint about romances written by ‘Abbie-lubbers’: Works of Thomas Nashe, i. 11.
Stephen Gosson’s attack on plays about knights ‘passing from countrie to countrie’ and
fighting monsters made of brown paper may also contain an anti-Catholic jibe in that
the hero is so altered that on his return he can only be recognized by ‘a piece of cockle
shell’—the symbol of a pilgrim: Playes Confuted in fiue Actions […] (London, 1582),
C6r .
⁶⁹ In classical drama tragedy (such as Aeschylus’ Agamemnon or Sophocles’ Oedipus
the King) is primarily about kings or military rulers and comedy (such as Aristophanes’
Lysistrata or Plautus’ Amphitryo) women or servants.
⁷⁰ Sir Philip Sidney, 244.
the classical decorums of place, time, and person. Whetstone explicitly
objects to Continental religious drama, which ‘is too holye: for [it]
presentes on everye common Stage, what Preachers should pronounce
in Pulpets’. His rejection of English popular theatre declares that the
English playwright ‘fyrst groundes his worke on impossibilities: then
in three howers ronnes he throwe the worlde: marryes, gets Children,
makes Children men, men conquer kingdomes, murder Monsters, and
bringeth Gods from Heaven, and fetcheth Divels from Hel … Manye
tymes (to make mirthe) they make a Clowne companion with a Kinge’.⁷¹
Whetstone’s complaint about gods and devils being portrayed on stage
suggests that he is thinking of biblical drama as the chief culprit in this
regard.
A diatribe against mixing kings and clowns may seem a surprising
opening for Promos and Cassandra for those who know that Whetstone’s
version of the unjust judge story is the source for Shakespeare’s lower-
class characters in Measure for Measure. In Whetstone’s play, however,
there are discrete scenes of comic low-life, a strict separation of style
on social principles, and the tacit assumption of high social status
with virtue. As John Cox has noted, while Shakespeare undoubtedly
followed Whetstone’s lead in introducing lower-class elements, he
pointedly eschewed Whetstone’s social stratification, preferring instead
the popular—and ultimately medieval—model of mingling kings and
clowns freely.⁷² Debora Kuller Shuger has argued that in the torn
consciousnesses of Shakespeare’s greatest tragic heroes—King Lear and
Hamlet—Shakespeare has taken such a model to its logical extreme,
by ‘assimilating the ancient Christian discourses of social injustice to
the structures of the psyche … The mixing of beggars, clowns, and
kings takes place within the tragic protagonist’.⁷³ In one sense, however,
this radical move is simply a return to the source of the mysteries’
social conscience and indecorous style: the God-man, carpenter-king,
shepherd-ruler, Jesus of Nazareth.
The social agenda of the mysteries is inspired by the Incarnation, and
played out both in the jumbling of characters and in the virtue of the
lowly and wickedness of those in authority. The status conferred on
⁷¹ Geoffrey Bullough, ed., Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare (London:

Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1964–75), ii. 443.
⁷² Cox, Shakespeare and the Dramaturgy of Power, 153.
⁷³ Debora Kuller Shuger, ‘Subversive Fathers and Suffering Subjects: Shakespeare and
Christianity’, in Donna B. Hamilton and Richard Strier, eds., Religion, Literature, and
Politics in Post-Reformation England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 57.
lower-class characters, such as Mary, may also be the dramatic precedent
not only for the indecorum of much early-modern drama, but even for
an aspect of its structure. Classical drama, as Aristotle records, centres
on one complete action and hence rarely has a fully developed sub-plot.
Sub-plot characters, and their ability to comment on the action of
the protagonist, are germane to Shakespeare and other early-modern
dramatists, despite being alien to classical drama. The interweaving of
two strands of plot, separate but interrelated (a structural device that
Shakespeare brings to perfection in 1 Henry IV ), is not part of English
drama’s classical inheritance.⁷⁴ The comic characters parody the main
plot characters, and in doing so make the audience interrogate what
they stand for: Falstaff ’s catechism on honour grounds Hotspur’s eulogy
about it, Stephano’s bottle (which he orders Caliban to venerate with
the words ‘kiss the book’) gives him an authority over his companions
which shadows the ascendancy given to Prospero through his books
and Lucio’s sneering denial of the bail Pompey had expected reflects
on Isabella’s manner of refusing her brother’s hoped-for reprieve. This
complex, sophisticated, and deeply satisfying plot-structure may have
evolved from the iconographic and dramatic cycles of medieval culture.
In a fifteenth-century Book of Hours, for example, the painter of the
Gold Scrolls has complemented the illustration of Passion with an
interwoven life of the Virgin in the historiated initial of each page. As
Peter Happé has argued: ‘The emotional effects of such juxtapositions
must have been considerable, especially as the tone of the Life of the
Virgin is essentially triumphant, in spite of her sorrows, whilst the
Passion is progressively more sombre, yet potentially triumphant in a
different way.’⁷⁵ The life of the Virgin was also used in an analogous
way in drama, and it has been suggested that the addition of events
in Mary’s life in the N-town cycle, so that her story becomes a mirror
of Christ’s life, creates the first consciously developed double-plot in
English drama.⁷⁶ The influence of the reflective strands of plot in
the mysteries on the sub-plots of early-modern drama has yet to be
⁷⁴ There are no extant Greek tragedies with a developed double-plot. The only Latin
play I am aware of that in any way shares this form is Plautus’ Amphitruro.
⁷⁵ Roger S. Wieck et al., Time Sanctified: The Book of Hours in Medieval Art and Life,
2nd edn. (New York: George Braziller in association with the Walters Art Museum,
Baltimore, 2001), fig. 45; Happé, Cyclic Form, 95.
⁷⁶ Martin Stevens, Four Middle English Mystery Cycles: Textual, Contextual and Critical
Interpretations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 245.
fully articulated, but it is implicit in Empson’s brilliant discussion
of double-plots in the Wakefield Second Shepherd’s play and 1 Henry
IV.⁷⁷
One final example of a classical decorum violated by both mystery
plays and Shakespeare involves the presentation of violence on stage.
In classical drama death, such as the killing of Agamemnon or the
dismemberment of Pentheus, was reported rather than performed.
Early-modern drama, however, does not shrink from staging murder,
as the holocausts at the end of such plays as Hamlet, The Duchess of
Malfi, and Women Beware Women testify. Few Greek tragedies have
on-stage deaths (the eponymous heroes of Ajax and Hippolytus are,
perhaps, unique examples) whereas in the mystery plays the Crucifixion
was the climactic stage spectacle of the whole cycle. Like death, violence
against the body (such as Oedipus’s self-blinding) is generally committed
off-stage in classical drama, but the scourging and beating of Christ’s
body, as well as his agonized death on the cross, were vividly enacted
in the mystery plays. In Shakespeare the violent power of medieval
theatre, rather than the decorum of classical theatre, is revived in
drama which forces the sight of Lear’s death, Gloucester’s blinding,
Desdemona’s suffocation, Antony’s mangled suicide, and the gang-
murders of Hector and Caesar upon its audience.⁷⁸ Elizabethan drama
as a whole has inherited its emphasis on affective, high-octane theatre
from the mystery plays in which the violence and death inflicted on the
protagonist was the central, graphically staged event.
Elizabethans knew Greek tragedy primarily through Seneca’s Latin
translations, but early-modern theatre replaced Senecan descriptions of
pain with the physical presence of the wounded body. Rhetoric does
not elicit a comparable emotional response to that created by actually
observing pain and death, a truism which Elaine Scarry has theorized by
arguing for the inexpressibility of pain: not merely that it is difficult to
define, or that it reduces its victims to pre-linguistic cries and groans, but
⁷⁷ William Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966),

29–31.
⁷⁸ See Richard Strier’s excellent discussion of how the violation of classical decorum
in the staging of Gloucester’s blinding creates the audience’s sympathy for the action
of the servant: Richard Strier, ‘Faithful Servants: Shakespeare’s Praise of Disobedience’,
in Heather Dubrow and Richard Strier, eds., The Historical Renaissance: New Essays on
Tudor and Stuart Literature and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988),
119–20.
that because ‘it takes no object it, more than any other phenomenon,
resists objectification in language’.⁷⁹ The staging of suffering is central
to both the mysteries and early-modern drama, and in Shakespeare it is
often at these moments that the connection with medieval dramaturgy
is strongest.⁸⁰ In mystery plays the suffering victim was the central
character and medieval affective piety encouraged the audience to enter
as fully as possible into his torment. The centrality of suffering in both
forms of theatre has lead Michael O’Connell to argue that:
it was the traditional biblical theater that in fact authorized the portrayal of
violence and physical brutality on stage and gave it a moral valence … the
central point of relation is one that rests on the implications of incarnation,
that God and man share a body, a body that may be shown to suffer and die.
When the enactment of a singular sacred body became transgressive, the new
public theater that emerged in the last quarter of the sixteenth century can be
understood as refracting that body into a variety of tragic experience.⁸¹
The Incarnation lies at the core of the differences between the mysteries
and classical drama that have been discussed above. The mystery plays
enacted the Incarnation in which God and man become one and
hence any attempt to keep characters in separate social spheres was
both untenable and undesirable. They performed the whole of salvation
history and hence could not preserve the unities of time or space. Their
climax was the torture and killing of this God-man and therefore to
obviate stage violence or death would be anathema to the affective
design of the drama. The Incarnation was the subject of the cycle plays
and it enforced and enabled a new form of drama.
The celebration of the Incarnation, and its re-enactment in the mass,
was also the occasion of these plays as well as their central event. The
genesis of the mystery plays occurred as part of the festival of Corpus
Christi. This feast celebrated the body of Christ in all its incarnations:
the historical moment when God became man, the church as the body of
⁷⁹ Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1985), 5.
⁸⁰ This has been recognized, in particular, at the blinding of Gloucester and the deaths
of York and Desdemona. See O’Connell, The Idolatrous Eye, 87–8; Beatrice Groves,
‘ ‘‘Now wole I a newe game begynne’’: Staging Suffering in King Lear, the Mystery
Plays and Grotius’s Christus Patiens’, Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England
20 (forthcoming 2007); Jones, Origins, 54–6; Cox, Shakespeare and the Dramaturgy
of Power, 93–9; The Third Part of King Henry VI, ed. Michael Hattaway, The New
Cambridge Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), notes to 1. 4. 67,
1. 4. 78–83, 1. 4. 93; Milward, Shakespeare’s Religious Background, 250. See also Ch. 4.
⁸¹ O’Connell, The Idolatrous Eye, 87–8.
Christ now present on earth and, primarily, in the mass.⁸² The doctrine
of transubstantiation was formalized at the Fourth Lateran Council in
1215 and the feast of Corpus Christi was created by Pope Urban IV
in 1264 to celebrate and give devotional focus to the new doctrine. By
1318 the feast of Corpus Christi had arrived in England and by the
second quarter of the fourteenth century the Corpus Christi procession
was accompanied by dramatic presentations or tableaux vivants. Corpus
Christi theatre grew out of these displays, and although many towns
and cities did not have the fully fledged cycles that have been recorded
in York, Chester, and Beverley, most celebrated the festival with some
form of drama such as a Passion or sacrament play.⁸³ In the Croxton
Play of the Sacrament for example, which Gail McMurray Gibson has
argued was part of the Corpus Christi celebrations in Bury St Edmunds,
the play merges with the other festival celebrations as the host at the
centre of the plot is borne to church in procession by the character
Episcopus.⁸⁴ The fever of dramatic activity that surrounded the festival
from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century proves the ubiquity of
dramatic creation to the celebration of the feast. Throughout England
the embodied art was recognized as belonging to the festival of Christ’s
body.⁸⁵
Corpus Christi drama has a fundamental connection with the Incarn-
ation, but it is also possible to argue that the emergence of drama
as a whole in medieval Europe coincided with the revaluation of the
humanity of the incarnate Christ. Most extant dramatic, liturgical texts
date from the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries when the doctrinal
debate which culminated in the doctrine of transubstantiation was tak-
ing place. Michael O’Connell has argued that the impetus for theatre
came from this new concern with corporeality and that the revaluation
of Christ’s humanity underlay the way in which Christianity would
⁸² For the emphasis on the church as the body of Christ in this festival see Mervyn
James, Society, Politics and Culture: Studies in Early Modern England (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1986), 16–47. On the cycles’ relation to the festival see
V. A. Kolve, The Play Called Corpus Christi (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1966),
44–9; Peter W. Travis, Dramatic Design in the Chester Cycle (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1982), 1–29; Lauren Lepow, Enacting the Sacrament: Counter-Lollardy
in the Towneley Cycle (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1990).
⁸³ Rubin, Corpus Christi, 199, 272–5.
⁸⁴ Gibson, The Theatre of Devotion, 38.
⁸⁵ Rubin, Corpus Christi, 229–32, 275–82. In certain places it was also the Corpus
Christi guild which provided the play for the festival: Karl Young, ‘An Interludium for a
Gild of Corpus Christi’, Modern Language Notes 48 (1933): 84–6; Chambers, Mediaeval
Stage, ii. 118–19, 371.
come to valorize materiality and the physical expression of spiritual con-
cerns. The same argument has been made by Gail McMurray Gibson,
originating in her study of the devotion of fifteenth-century East Anglia.
The physical aspects of devotional piety in the late-medieval period and
its tendency to transform the abstract and theological to the personal
and concrete, Gibson argues, show a conscious effort to objectify the
spiritual even as the Incarnation itself had given spirit a concrete form.⁸⁶
The Incarnation gave theoretical justification to a defence of the visual
arts, and Incarnational aspects of the Corpus Christi cycles can be seen
as metonymic not only for medieval drama as a whole, but for the whole
emphasis on the visual and the concrete in late-medieval devotion.⁸⁷
This Incarnational aesthetic resulted in the specific aspects of English
drama that have been discussed above—mingling of genre, persons,
the staging of chronological impossibilities, and violence—and the
phenomenology of theatre itself also carried with it a legacy of Incarn-
ational understanding. As Helen Cooper has argued the fundamental
connection of early-modern drama and the mysteries lies here: ‘For it
is that element of enactment—of subordinating the word to the deed,
supplementing speech with embodiment, that the plays written for the
sixteenth-century public theatres carry over from the cycle plays, and
which mark both sorts as a distinctive kind, not just of text, but of
theatre.’⁸⁸ The inheritance of this Incarnational aesthetic by Elizabethan
and Jacobean drama is one reason why the reformer’s challenge to the
theatre went beyond the suppression of the mystery plays.
Theatre is a mixed medium—visual as well as verbal—and the
polemists’ horror at men dressed as women, or falsehood presented as
truth, or biblical phrases found in the texts of profane plays, is a symptom
of a much deeper distrust of theatrical presentation as a whole. Pure and
true language is infected by its visual medium: ‘The reuerend word of
God, & histories of the Bible set forth on the stage by these blasphemous
plaiers, are … corrupted with their gestures of scurrilitie.’⁸⁹ The mixed
medium of theatre shares, in Protestant anti-theatrical tracts, the taint of
the Catholic eucharistic rite. Anti-Catholic and anti-theatrical polemic
converged in this period: Catholics were attacked for being theatrical,
⁸⁶ O’Connell, The Idolatrous Eye, 47, 64–5; Gibson, The Theatre of Devotion, 6–8
and passim. See also Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, 22–37, 183–6.
⁸⁷ Gibson, The Theatre of Devotion, 13–15; O’Connell, The Idolatrous Eye, 38–41, 50.
⁸⁸ Cooper, ‘Shakespeare and the Mystery Plays’, 19.
⁸⁹ Eutheo Anglo-phile, A second and third blast of retrait from plaies and Theaters […]
(London, 1580), H2r .
actors for performing papist rites. The value placed on the physical
elements of the mass was linked in the reformers’ language with the
gaudy frippery of props and costumes. The instinctive fear of mixture
and taint in godly rhetoric recoiled from both the drama of the mass
and the ritual of plays in which powerful words are embedded in an
emotionally involving spectacle. Both Catholic ceremonial and dramatic
presentations rely on the assimilation of word and image, and diatribes
against plays and the mass became mirror-images of each other.⁹⁰
Catholicism’s Incarnational aesthetic, centring on an event in which
God became man, and re-enacted in a sacrament in which bread became
flesh, was something that reformers, with their stress on purity and the
primacy of the Word, wished to struggle free from. Despite the initial
enthusiasm for theatrical performances in the early Reformation, by
the late-Elizabethan period reformers were as antagonistic to theatrical
performance as they were to church ritual. Drama which contained
scriptural allusions was most violently opposed, but for many reformers
all theatre was idolatrous, not merely biblical theatre. William Rankins
was not simply describing mystery plays when he wrote: ‘No doubt but
there is amongst them can play Iudas, as naturally as if he were the
very man that betrayed Christ, & verily … these godlesse men crucifie
Christ a newe, when they thus seeke to deface his glory, to mangle his
members, and rent in peeces his sacred body.’⁹¹ In Rankins’s heated
rhetoric the performers who deface the image of God in their bodies
(by counterfeiting in secular plays) enact a Passion play: secular theatre
is transformed into religious theatre simply because it is embodied.
Early-modern drama acts out its action through the bodies of its
performers, and although this might seem germane to all theatre,
classical drama as inherited by Elizabethan England was a predominantly
verbal medium. It has long been argued that Seneca was intended for
declamation rather than for portrayal, as his plays replace affective
spectacle with rhetoric and action with long speeches.⁹² Helen Cooper
has argued that the mystery cycles, rather than Greek and Latin drama,
were the source for early-modern theatre’s emphasis on embodied action:
‘drama that acts its action is not the automatic default position, as
⁹⁰ Jonas Barish, The Antitheatrical Prejudice (Berkeley: University of California Press,

1981), 160–5.
⁹¹ William Rankins, A Mirrovr of Monsters […] (London, 1587), Gv –G2r .
⁹² Norman T. Pratt, Seneca’s Drama (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 1983), 132–63; John G. Fitch, ‘Playing Seneca?’, in George W. M. Harrison, ed.,
Seneca in Performance (London: Duckworth, 2000), 9–10.
classical and humanist drama shows. Rather, it is a medieval invention,
and one that the sixteenth-century public theatre adopted and built
on.’⁹³ Reformist biblical drama shows what classically inspired early-
modern theatre looks like. These plays centre on Christ’s words rather
than his presence. The legend on the title page of Bale’s God’s Promises
declares where its emphasis lies: ‘in the worde (whych now is Christ
the eternall sonne of God) was lyfe from the begynnynge’.⁹⁴ The play
which follows God’s Promises in Bale’s cycle is John the Baptist’s Preaching
(1538), rather than the traditional Nativity play. This is because Bale
is not interested in the affective spectacle of the infant Christ: for Bale,
Christ is only a truly dramatic character once he can speak.⁹⁵
Bale’s stress on Christ as the Word leads to plays which are in some
senses simply animated doctrine. Other reformers, such as Stephen
Gosson, went even further and thought all plays should be closet drama,
written only to be read. He suggests that the Passion play attributed
to St Gregory of Nazianzus is one such, and imputes to St Gregory an
anachronistic hatred of the mysteries in order to argue that verbal drama
is a distinctively Protestant form, created to combat the physicality of
Catholic theatre:
For Naziancen detesting the corruption of the Corpus Christi Playes that were
set out by the Papistes, and inveighing against them, thought it better to
write the passion of Christ in numbers him selfe, that all such as delight in
numerositie of speach might reade it, not beholde it vpon the Stage, where
some base fellowe that plaide Christe, should bring the person of Christ into
contempt.⁹⁶
The embodiment that is ignored by Bale, alien to Gosson, and irrelevant
to Seneca is central to both mystery plays and Elizabethan drama. The
‘enfleshment’ of scripts by actors lies at the heart of the shared medieval
and early-modern conception of theatre.
The anti-theatricalists of the sixteenth century were clear that it was
the aspect of embodiment (even more than any religious subject matter)
⁹³ Cooper, ‘Shakespeare and the Mystery Plays’, 20.

⁹⁴ The Complete Plays of John Bale, ed. Peter Happé (Bury St Edmunds: D. S. Brewer,
1986), ii. 2.
⁹⁵ For the evidence that there is no missing Nativity play see Bale’s account of the
performance of these plays: Chambers, Mediaeval Stage, ii. 374.
⁹⁶ Gosson, Playes Confuted, E5v –6r . George Sandys detects the influence of St Gregory
of Nazianzus on Hugo Grotius’s Passion play, which (in its English translation) was not
intended for the stage: Hugo Grotius, Christs Passion A Tragedie: with annotations, trans.
George Sandys (London, 1640), A3r .
which made drama idolatrous. As seen above Stephen Gosson could
even defend the religious subject of St Gregory of Nazianzus’s Christos
Paschon because he argued that it was not intended to be staged, but
that any play ‘to ye worldes end, if it be presented upon the stage,
shall carry that brand of his backe … that is, idolatrie’.⁹⁷ When in 1576
Hutton, the Dean of York, forbade the performance of mystery plays,
he issued an order stating that: ‘No Pageant be vsed or set furthe
wherein the Maiestye of god the father god the sonne or god the holie
ghoste or the administration of either the sacramentes of Baptisme
or of the lordes Supper be counterfeyted or represented; or anythinge
plaied which tende to the maintenaunce of superstition and idolatrie.’⁹⁸
For both Gosson and Hutton the real stumbling block is the idolatry
inherent in all physical enactment. The charge of idolatry did not just
belong to religious drama, but was levelled against all theatre because it
was an art form which promoted the visual and embodied its action.⁹⁹
Polemists and members of the church hierarchy who inveighed against
mystery plays were invariably supporters of the suppression of drama as
a whole. In 1575, when Elizabeth visited Kenilworth Castle, Coventry
players petitioned her for the revival of their plays, ostensibly asking for
the return of the secular drama The Conquest of the Danes, which was
performed ‘without ill exampl of mannerz, papistry, or ony superstition’
but had been recently suppressed by ‘the zeal of certain theyr Preacherz:
men very commendabl for their behauiour and learning, & sweet in their
sermons, but sumwhat too sour in preaching awey theyr pastime’.¹⁰⁰
Zealous Protestants were antithetical to all drama, not simply religious
drama, because to them all plays smelt of popery. This position is wit-
tily expressed in Thomas Randolph’s The Muses Looking-Glasse (1638),
which light-heartedly acknowledges an irreducibly Catholic aspect to
early-modern theatre. London playhouses were built in the liberties:
those areas of the city which lay outside the city’s jurisdiction because
they had been the sites of religious houses. To Puritans playhouses were
the spiritual heirs of the insititutions they replaced, inheriting their
vacuous visual splendour as well as their anomalous legal status, and The
⁹⁷ Gosson, Playes Confuted, E7r . Cf. O’Connell, The Idolatrous Eye, 34.
⁹⁸ Quoted in Alan H. Nelson, The Medieval English Stage: Corpus Christi Pageants
and Plays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), 85.
⁹⁹ O’Connell, The Idolatrous Eye, 14–15, 20, 26–7.
¹⁰⁰ Robert Laneham, A Letter: Whearin, part of the entertainment vntoo the Queens
Maiesty, at killingwoorth Castle, in Warwik sheer in this Soomerz Progress 1575 iz signified
[…] (n. pl., 1575), C2r .
Muses Looking-Glasse reports a Puritan quip about Blackfriars playhouse
that ‘He wonders how it scapd demolishing | I’ th’ time of reforma-
tion.’¹⁰¹ Blackfriars may no longer be the abode of Dominicans, but the
connection between the two institutions goes deeper than their coin-
cidence of name and situation. Reformers feared that while they were
suppressing idolatry in one sphere, reducing the visual stimulus of wor-
ship by whitewashing walls, simplifying vestments, and discontinuing
the elevation of the host, it might be simply re-emerging elsewhere.
A number of critics have argued that it is no coincidence that the
most vibrant and exciting time in England’s theatrical history occurred
at the same time as the solidification of the hegemony of Protestantism.
An early proponent of this idea was C. L. Barber, who argued that the
restriction of the impulse for physicality in the new Protestant worship
created a compensatory fascination with drama.¹⁰² Concrete evidence
for this idea seems to come from the use of vestments on the stage.
Records in King’s College Cambridge state that in the 1550s ‘certayne
vestmentes [were] transpoised into players garmentes’.¹⁰³ Evidence
from various other parish records and players’ accounts indicates that
this was not an isolated phenomenon.¹⁰⁴ Glynne Wickham uses this
evidence to support his theory that the immediate parentage for the
sartorial excesses of the post-Reformation stage is the colour and richness
of the ecclesiastical vestments that had been purged from Protestant
worship, arguing that theatre compensated for something lost in the
religious sphere.¹⁰⁵ Stephen Greenblatt has argued that vestments,
though originally perhaps used as an aggressive appropriation of the
accoutrements of the Catholic religion by Protestant players, had the
¹⁰¹ Thomas Randolph, The Muses Looking-Glasse (London, 1638), A3v .

¹⁰² C. L. Barber, Creating Elizabethan Tragedy: The Theater of Marlowe and Kyd, ed.
Richard P. Wheeler (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 125.
¹⁰³ For this and other similar records see Nelson, Cambridge, i. 127, 843, 152–3,
180–1. The records in Kings have been amended by the Marian sacristan, Carleton, who
not only converted the costumes back into vestments, but entered this into the earlier
inventory. He added to the 1552–3 account of ‘Item one coope of the best redde tusshes
turnyd into a cloke with a cape of the best redde’ the words ‘& now in to a coope againe’
(p.181), and repeated this codicil for almost all the converted vestments.
¹⁰⁴ Somerset, Shropshire, i. 211–13; Giles E. Dawson, ed., Records of Plays and Players
in Kent 1450–1642, Collections Volume VII (Oxford: Malone Society, 1965), 207;
Wickham, Early English Stages, ii. 38; George David, ed., Lancashire, Records of Early
English Drama (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991), 40; Chambers, Mediaeval
Stage, ii. 343, 367. See also Paul Whitfield White, ‘Reforming Mysteries’ End: A New
Look at Protestant Intervention in English Provincial Drama’, Journal of Medieval and
Early Modern Studies 29/1 (1999): 134.
¹⁰⁵ Wickham, Early English Stages, ii. 38
unexpected function of transferring to the theatre what remained of
Catholicism’s charisma, although fundamentally devalued in its transfer
from the sacred to the secular. The vestments stand as an objective
correlative for the theological material which the Reformation had
unsettled from its institutional moorings and thereby made available for
theatrical appropriation.¹⁰⁶
Visual splendour is an important connection between Catholic ritual
and the early-modern stage. The stage was a place of gorgeous costumes
and ritual, a new space consecrated for sensory pleasure at the time when
the church was becoming bare and stripped of all such visual stimu-
lation.¹⁰⁷ As Glynne Wickham has argued: ‘Elizabethan censorship of
subject matter … has neither suppressed the stagecraft associated by tradi-
tion with the Catholic ritual out of which it had developed, nor reformed
the public appetite for the glamour of this ritual.’¹⁰⁸ More recent critics
might be cautious about assuming the evolutionary model from liturgy
to drama, but Sarah Beckwith has likewise argued that: ‘Shakespeare’s
theater does not represent the supercession and succession of religion,
purgatory, and ritual action by a disenchanted theater, but the persist-
ence of its historical concerns in the incarnation of performance.’¹⁰⁹Louis
Montrose also sees the theatre absorbing and providing a vital ritualist-
ic function within Shakespeare’s society by providing a compensatory
source of engaging and deeply satisfying collective experience.¹¹⁰
This reading of early-modern theatre as a visually stimulating and
emotionally affective form of ritualistic communal engagement is a
broadly persuasive view of the way that Elizabethan and Jacobean
theatre relates to the religious climate of its time. This mode of
expression had been curtailed in religious worship and it seems highly
¹⁰⁶ Stephen Greenblatt, Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture (New
York: Routledge, 1990), 162–3. See also Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory, 249; Stephen
Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance
England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 94–128.
¹⁰⁷ For the astonishing value and variety of costumes see Andrew Gurr, The
Shakespearean Stage 1574–1642, 3rd edn. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1992), 194–8.
¹⁰⁸ Wickham, Early English Stages, ii. 37.
¹⁰⁹ Sarah Beckwith, ‘Stephen Greenblatt’s Hamlet and the Forms of Oblivion’, Journal
of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 33/2 (2003): 275.
¹¹⁰ Louis A. Montrose, ‘The Purpose of Playing: Reflections on a Shakespearean
Anthropology’, Helios 7/2 (1979–80): 64, 60. See also Barber, Creating Elizabethan
Tragedy; Crockett, The Play of Paradox, 33–4; Ramie Targoff, ‘The Performance of
Prayer: Sincerity and Theatricality in Early Modern England’, Representations 60 (1997):
60 and passim.
suggestive that it should have emerged elsewhere. Nonetheless theatre
did not only grow out of the demise of Catholicism, but also engaged
with the vigour of Protestantism. Elizabethan theatre enacted embod-
iment, but it also engaged with the Reformation scepticism about the
relationship between representation and truth. Huston Diehl has argued
that although Elizabethan and Jacobean drama articulates the anxieties
created by Protestant assaults on late medieval piety, it is not particularly
sympathetic to the old religion. Central to Diehl’s argument is the idea
that the meta-theatre in early-modern theatre calls attention to the act
of seeing and underlies the fictionality of what is perceived, and in
doing so encourages a distrust of Incarnational ways of thinking and
seeing.¹¹¹ Diehl, like Greenblatt and Dawson, argues that the terms
of the eucharistic controversy—central to the understanding of semi-
otics in the post-Reformation period—affected the way that theatrical
presentation was understood.¹¹²
Diehl’s argument is a useful corrective to an over-romanticized view
of the relation between Catholicism and early-modern drama, but
meta-theatre does not destroy theatrical presence. Anthony Dawson
has argued in response to Diehl that ‘the meta-theatrical sets up a
second, contrary movement whereby the affective power of the visible
is underscored’.¹¹³ O’Connell likewise concludes that Shakespeare’s
insistent meta-theatricality ends in a celebration of the visual. He argues
that:
affirmation of spectacle is thus more than an allowance of the visual character of
theater. It is a legitimation of a way of knowing asserted against humanist claims
for an exclusive, or near exclusive, truth in language … . the fullness of theater
¹¹¹ Huston Diehl, Staging Reform, Reforming the Stage: Protestantism and Popular
Theatre in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), 5, and
passim; Huston Diehl, ‘Observing the Lord’s Supper and the Lord Chamberlain’s Men:
The Visual Rhetoric of Ritual and Play in Early Modern England’, Renaissance Drama
22 (1991): 147–74. For engagements with, and critiques of, Diehl’s argument see
Anthony B. Dawson, ‘Huston Diehl. Staging Reform, Refroming the Stage: Protestantism
and Popular Theater in Early Modern England’, Shakespeare Quarterly 50/2 (1999):
221–4; Crockett, The Play of Paradox, 54–5.
¹¹² Stephen Greenblatt and Catherine Gallagher, Practicing New Historicism (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2000), 136–62. For readings of specific plays with reference
to eucharistic controversy see Anthony B. Dawson and Paul Yachnin, The Culture
of Playgoing in Shakespeare’s England: A Collaborative Debate (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2001), 148–9; Barber, Creating Elizabethan Tragedy, 99–102; Joel B.
Altman, ‘ ‘‘Vile Participation’’: The Amplification of Violence in the Theater of Henry
V ’, Shakespeare Quarterly 42/1 (1991): 4–5, 13 n. 38, 16, 19 n. 50, 30–1.
¹¹³ Dawson, The Culture of Playgoing, 22.
rests also on what is taken in by the eye, and its very ground is impersonation
by living, breathing human bodies.¹¹⁴
Late sixteenth-century theatre is committed to both ritualistic display
and meta-theatricality; to visual pleasure and the verbal interrogation
of the reality of the presentation. Early-modern theatre embodied the
Incarnational legacy of Corpus Christi drama, but it was also responsive
to contemporary controversies about the truth of presentation. As
Dawson has recently argued, these differences can be reconciled by
regarding early modern theatre as a medium that reflexively stages the
conflict about images, celebrating and employing affective spectacle
while remaining sceptical about audience susceptibility and the relation
of visual power to truth.¹¹⁵
The different devotional foci of Catholicism and Protestantism meant
that reformers polarized them as the religion of the eye and the religion
of the ear. The ear was the primary organ of truth for Protestants who
wanted to replace the visual with the aural, the sacring of the mass with
sermons, priests with preachers. Visual, embodied theatre was seen as
irreducibly Catholic in the eyes of early-modern Protestants. William
Lambarde, reflecting on the dramatic Catholic liturgy he watched as
a child, concluded ‘sence true Faithe cometh by hearinge and not by
seinge, [Faith] is more then al the Spectacles in the Worlde can bringe to
pass’.¹¹⁶ Shakespeare, however, was engaged in awaking a different kind
of faith and his drama celebrates both the visual, physical nature of its
embodied art and its poetic and rhetorical sophistication. Early-modern
theatre does not privilege the ear over the eye, nor the image over the
word, but harmonizes them in drama which suits, as Hamlet says, ‘the
action to the word, the word to the action’. The 1590s was an innovative
time in English theatre when the cultural heritage of the old faith and
the linguistic excitement of the new learning were both appropriated by
the stage. The lingering memory of the visual stimuli of Catholicism,
and the rising literary awareness inspired by Protestantism, created a
culture ripe for the most verbally sophisticated and visually affective
dramaturgy.
¹¹⁴ O’Connell, The Idolatrous Eye, 143–4.

¹¹⁵ Dawson, The Culture of Playgoing, 135–6.
¹¹⁶ William Lambarde, Dictionarium Angliae Topographicum & Historicum (London,
1730), 459–60. Although not published until the eighteenth century, this account was
written before Lambarde’s death in 1601. Some theatrical apologists cheekily inverted
this well-known formulation into: ‘Men are not wonn by th’eares so well as eyes’:
Randolph, The Muses Looking-Glasse, A4r .
3
Comedic Form and Paschal Motif in the
First and Second Quartos of
Romeo and Juliet
In John Madden’s film Shakespeare in Love the hero is writing a comedy

(Romeo and Ethel the Pirate’s Daughter) which eventually, in response
to the thwarted love affair in his own life, metamorphoses into tragedy.
The scriptwriters Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard have wittily picked
up on a truth about the Shakespearean plot their story is based on.
The generic instability of much of Romeo and Juliet was admitted not
merely in the 1990s or by the late seventeenth century, when it was
played as a tragedy and tragi-comedy on alternate nights, but also by
Shakespeare himself when he burlesqued his story as the ‘very tragical
mirth’ of Pyramus and Thisbe.¹ A central aspect of comedic form in the
play is the plot’s climax in the apparent death and resurrection of Juliet,
an event concocted by the Friar to circumvent the obstacles facing the
young lovers. The elasticity of death is germane to comedy and plays
which copied the plot device of the sleeping potion in the following
years all transmuted it into comedy.² In A Midsummer Night’s Dream,
likewise, Pyramus/Bottom does not remain dead but leaps up to explain
the redemptive aspect of the plot to the spectators: ‘no, I assure you, the
wall is down that parted their fathers’ (5. 1. 332).
¹ Ann Pasternak Slater, ‘Petrarchism Come True in Romeo and Juliet’, in D. J. Palmer,
Roger Pringle, and Werner Habicht, eds., Images of Shakespeare: Proceedings of the Third
Congress of the International Shakespeare Association (Newark: University of Delaware
Press, 1988), 131. For the evidence that Romeo and Juliet preceded Dream, see Kenneth
Muir, The Sources of Shakespeare’s Plays (London: Methuen, 1977), 77; Amy J. Reiss,
‘ ‘‘Tragical Mirth’’: From Romeo to Dream’, Shakespeare Quarterly 43/2 (1992): 215.
² John Day, Law Tricks by John Day, 1608, ed. John Crow (Oxford: The Malone
Society, 1949), ll. 2288–90; Thomas Dekker, Satiromastix in The Dramatic Works of
Thomas Dekker, ed. Fredson Bowers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953),
i. 5. 2. 96–108; Edward Sharpham, The Fleire by Edward Sharpham: Nach Der Quarto
1607, ed. Hunold Nibbe (Vaduz: Kraus Reprint, 1912/63), 4. 195–284.
Comedic Form and Paschal Motif 61
This stock romance device of an apparent death followed by res-
toration to life is also part of the paschal motif which runs through
Romeo and Juliet and strengthens the comedic matrix of the tragedy.³
Many of the plot parallels between Romeo and Juliet and the Easter
story (such as the friar who flees, like the women, from the tomb)
were already present in Shakespeare’s sources: Brooke’s The Tragicall
Historye of Romeus and Juliet and Painter’s The Story of Romeo and
Julietta.⁴ In both of these the love-story is set within a liturgical frame-
work. The birth and death of Romeo and Juliet’s relationship occurs in
synchrony with the birth and death of Christ: they meet at Christmas
and are parted at Easter.⁵ Shakespeare has removed these markers of
a paschal theme—his play is set in July—but retains their import.
The sources draw attention to the significant timing of the tragedy,
but they make little of its metaphorical possibilities. Shakespeare, by
contrast, takes up their prompt and employs it with sophisticated
artistry to imbue the fabric of his play with a subverted promise of
redemption. Easter is no longer openly referred to, but the threat of
death and the hope of resurrection become deeply entwined with the
story.
This chapter will not only argue that the Easter allusions are one,
unrecognized, part of the comedic theme, but also that the play’s earliest
texts—An Excellent conceited Tragedie of Romeo and Iuliet, printed in
1597 (Q1) and The Most Excellent and lamentable Tragedie, of Romeo
and Iuliet, printed in 1599 (Q2)—diverge in their presentation of the
paschal motif and other comedic elements.⁶ A thoroughgoing study of
³ The popularity of this motif in romance appears to date from the first century 
and it has recently been suggested this is due to the influence of Christianity on the
Graeco-Roman world: N. T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God (Bath: Society
for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 2003), 69–75. My thanks to Stephen Medcalf for
alerting me to this.
⁴ There has been scant critical attention of this aspect of the play. The only two
references I have found are Roy Battenhouse, Shakespearean Tragedy: Its Art and Its
Christian Premises (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1969), 115; Peter Milward,
Shakespeare’s Religious Background, 29.
⁵ Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources, i. ll. 155, 959; William Painter, The
Story of Romeo and Julietta (1587), in Elizabethan Love Stories, ed. T. J. B. Spencer
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), 54, 65. The idea of a liturgically situated love affair,
commencing at Christmas and ending at Easter, also occurs in Du Bellay’s L’Olive:
Joachim Du Bellay, L’Olive, ed. Ernesta Caldarini (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1974),
sonnets 5, 111; Verdun L. Saulnier, Du Bellay (Paris: Hatier, 1968), 63.
⁶ All quarto references are to An Excellent conceited Tragedie of Romeo and Iuliet
(London: John Danter, 1597) and The Most Excellent and lamentable Tragedie, of Romeo
and Iuliet. Newly corrected, augmented, and amended (London: Cuthbert Burby, 1599).
62 Comedic Form and Paschal Motif
differences which consistently alter an aspect of the text, the groundwork
for a theory of authorial revision (most famously used in Taylor and
Warren’s reappraisal of King Lear) has not yet been attempted for Romeo
and Juliet. However, Q1 and Q2 are among the early Shakespeare
texts which show patterned variation: coherent differences which create
distinct continuities (such as in character, language, or theme) within the
texts. There are many other Shakespearean examples of such divergences
in the early texts, such as the strengthening of the character of Emilia
in the Folio Othello, the presentation of the war in the two texts of King
Lear and the different relationship of Hamlet to Laertes and Claudius
in the second quarto and the Folio.⁷
Such themed variation, which reshapes one aspect of the play, strongly
suggests that some of the differences between quarto and folio texts are
the result of intentional rather than random alteration. There is no
proof that this reviser is the author, but Grace Ioppolo has shown that
there is ample manuscript evidence in plays of this period for authorial
revision which reworks character, plot, theme, and structure in ways
comparable to the differences perceived in Shakespeare’s multiple texts.⁸
The themed yet delicate alterations apparent in Shakespeare’s early texts
seem to be most plausibly explained as the work of the dramatist himself,
as it is the author who is most likely to take such care over revising his
own play. John Kerrigan has shown that non-authorial revisers tend to
add or remove large sections of text, while revising authors—then as
now—tend to tinker, fidgeting over single-word substitutions.⁹ This
chapter suggests that the divergence of Q1 and Q2 Romeo and Juliet
raises the possibility that Shakespeare revised his play, and altered his
foul papers (the copy text for Q2) to give prominence to the comedic
side of the plot and the latent Easter narrative which is integral to the
promise of a happy resolution.
⁷ Nevill Coghill, Shakespeare’s Professional Skills (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1964), 164–202; Gary Taylor, ‘The War in King Lear’, Shakespeare Survey 33
(1980): 27–34; Paul Werstine, ‘The Textual Mystery of Hamlet’, Shakespeare Quarterly
39/1 (1988): 1–26. See also E. A. J. Honigmann, ‘Shakespeare’s Revised Plays: King
Lear and Othello’, The Library, 6th ser., 4 (1982): 142–73; Gary and Michael Warren
Taylor, eds., The Division of the Kingdoms: Shakespeare’s Two Versions of King Lear
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983); John Jones, Shakespeare at Work (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1995), 166–84, and passim.
⁸ Grace Ioppolo, Revising Shakespeare (London: Harvard University Press, 1991),
44–77.
⁹ John Kerrigan, ‘Revision, Adaptation, and the Fool in King Lear’, in Taylor and
Warren, eds., The Division of the Kingdoms, 195–213.
Juliet is central to the comedic strand of the tragedy: the witty female
who is the instigator of her own marriage, passionate in her desire for
sexual fulfilment, and whose language is alive with double meaning when
she banters with Paris. She is also at the heart of the paschal imagery in
the play, and although this grows to a climax at her death, it is present
even in the account of her infancy. The nurse’s garrulous and amusing
anecdote about weaning Juliet describes how she put wormwood on her
teat which the baby then refused, and at this moment an earthquake
shook the dovecote:
’Tis since the earthquake now eleven years,
And she was weaned—I never shall forget it—
Of all the days of the year upon that day,
For I had then laid wormwood on my dug,
Sitting in the sun under the dovehouse wall. (1. 3. 25–9)
It is a commonplace of Shakespeare criticism that the comic characters
explain more than they intend. The second part of the nurse’s story (in
which the child falls and hurts herself) can be taken as a metaphor for
the ensuing plot, and the ‘Ay!’ with which she responds to the nurse’s
husband’s sexual innuendo prefigures the absolute directness with which
Juliet commits herself to love and its physical expression.¹⁰ The first
part of the nurse’s story likewise reveals a theme underlying the main
plot. The nurse swears ‘by the rood’ (1. 3. 38) and the scene by the
dovehouse wall is a Crucifixion in innocent miniature, holding within
itself the Passion imagery which will underlie the passionate intensity of
the lovers.
There was an earthquake too when Christ was thirsty on the cross.
He was given ‘gall’, and like Juliet ‘when he had tasted thereof, he
would not drinke’ (Matt. 27: 34). The nurse has given Juliet worm-
wood to wean her: the milk will taste so bitter that Juliet will no
longer desire the breast. It was a common interpretation of the gall
and vinegar given to Jesus, that it was a cruel trick to deny him the
drink ostensibly proffered. This remained the dominant interpreta-
tion in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as well as being the
explanation favoured by the mystery plays. In the Chester Passion Jesus
is given the mixture with the words: ‘Yea, thou shalt have drynke
¹⁰ John Woolley, ‘Juliet’s Earthquake’, Critical Survey 3/1 (1991): 32. See also Barbara
Everett, ‘Romeo and Juliet: The Nurse’s Story’, in C. B. Cox and D. J. Palmer, eds.,
Shakespeare’s Wide and Universal Stage (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984),
134–45.
therfore | that thou shalt lyst to drynke no more.’¹¹ And shortly after-
wards, as with Juliet, ‘the earth did quake, & the stones were clouen’
(Matt. 27: 51).
The earthquake and wormwood are part of the biblical account
of the Crucifixion, but the nurse’s story contains another associated
image—doves and a dovecote—which also belonged to meditations
on the Passion and the mystery plays. An early seventeenth-century
sermon connects the spirit which Christ gave up when he died with
the dove released from the ark: ‘as Saint Ambrose comments, hee [the
dying Christ] sent his spirit out of his body as Noah sent his Dove out
of the Arke’.¹² In mystery plays too, the moment of Christ’s ‘giving up
the ghost’ was staged with a dove. One stage direction reads ‘bowing
his head, he gives up the spirit and a white dove shall fly off’; another
indicates that ‘a live dove is to be hidden in the cross, to fly out at
the death of Christ’.¹³ It is perhaps the representation of Christ’s spirit
as a dove that led Richard Rolle, in his ‘Meditations on the Passion’,
in which he imagines Christ’s crucified body as infinitely open and
permeable, to use the image of a dovecote for the Saviour’s body: ‘swet
Jhesu, thy body is like to a dufhouse. For as a dufhouse is ful of holys,
so is thy body ful of wounds.’ This dovecote metaphor arose from
the devotional apprehension of the accessibility of Christ’s body. It is
a striking link between the nurse’s anecdote and the Passion and is
also present in the morality play Wisdom, in which Christ describes his
crucified body as being ‘full of holys as a dovehows’.¹⁴
It is not only the events of the nurse’s story that recall Christ’s
story; the dramatic method of surrounding a child with pre-echoes of
¹¹ The Chester Mystery Cycle, ed. R. M. Lumiansky and David Mills, Early English
Text Society,  3 and 9 (London: Early English Text Society, 1974–86), 16a. 353–4.
For the longevity of this interpretation, see Hugo Grotius, Christ’s Passion, A Tragedy;
with Annotations, trans. George Sandys, 2nd edn. (London, 1687), F4v .
¹² Samuel Wallsall, The Life and Death of Iesus Christ in part: Summarily Comprising
his Infirmities and Sorrowes &c (Cambridge, 1607), D3r . For the iconographic connection
between Noah and the crucified Christ in the Holkham Bible Picture Book, see Happé,
Cyclic Form, 106.
¹³ Peter Meredith and John E. Tailby, The Staging of Religious Drama in Europe in
the Later Middle Ages (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Medieval Institute Publications, 1983), 119.
¹⁴ Richard Rolle, English Writings of Richard Rolle: Hermit of Hampole, ed. Hope
Emily Allen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963), 35; The Play of Wisdom: Its
Texts and Contexts, ed. Milla Cozart Riggio (New York: AMS, 1998), l. 1106. For the
importance of the permeability of Christ’s body in medieval devotional poetry see Sarah
Beckwith, Christ’s Body: Identity, Culture and Society in Late Medieval Writings (London:
Routledge, 1993), 56–63.
death is a traditional part of the Nativity. In Matthew’s Gospel, for
example, the wise men’s words ‘King of the Jews’ (2: 2) are to be
repeated in that Gospel only when they are written above him on the
cross (27: 37). Crucifixion images were likewise ubiquitous in medieval
paintings and plays of the Nativity. The Chester playwright dwells on
the pre-echo of Christ’s death in the magi’s gift of myrrh, the ointment
with which Christ’s dead body is anointed in John (19: 39).¹⁵ The
narrative of Juliet’s childhood at the beginning of the play partakes
of these traditional intimations of death; and her ‘death’ near the end
of the play, like Christ’s death, is likewise surrounded with hopes of
resurrection.
In John 20: 3–4 Peter and John race to the sepulchre, but John
outstrips Peter. When this story was dramatized in medieval Easter
liturgy, the youth of John and the age of Peter were emphasized: ‘let the
cantor appoint two, one old and the other young, who … should come
to the sepulchre, the youth first’. This has been described as the most
dramatic part of the Easter liturgy, because the priests impersonate the
disciples, and it is therefore unsurprising that it was also performed in
the mystery cycles. The stage direction of the N-Town play runs: ‘Hic
currunt Johannes et Petrus simul ad sepulchrum, et Johannes prius venit.’¹⁶
When Juliet is believed to have died, there is likewise a race to her tomb
in which the young man arrives first. This arrival of the beloved young
man, and then the old man, at Juliet’s tomb seems to be dramatically
affected by and reminiscent of the race between the young and old
disciples. The echo imbues Juliet with sanctity and her death with the
hope of resurrection, and it adds another facet to the opposition of
youth and age within the play. The religious resonance here, as in the
nurse’s enjoyable but apparently inconsequential story, is incorporated
into the comedic strand of the play.
The old are consistently slow with their delivery of news to the young
in Romeo and Juliet. With the nurse, in both her early long-winded
¹⁵ See also the echo of the magi’s words in Mary’s language as she brings her gift of
myrrh: Chester Mystery Cycle, 9. 176–81, 18. 329–32.
¹⁶ David Bevington, Medieval Drama (London: Houghton Mifflin, 1975), 38;
Karl Young, The Dramatic Associations of the Easter Sepulchre (Madison: University
of Wisconsin Press, 1920), 128; The N-Town Play: Cotton MS Vespasian D.8, ed.
Stephen Spector, Early English Text Society,  11 and 12 (Oxford: Early English Text
Society, 1991), 36. 364. See also the anti-Catholic satire, Regnum Papisticum, translated
into English in 1570, which describes this race being performed on Easter day: Thomas
Naogeorgus, The Popish Kingdome, or reigne of Anti christ, trans. Barnabe Googe (London,
1570), P4v .
anecdote, and her refusal to impart Romeo’s proposal without a good
sit down and a drink first, this tardiness is played as comedy. Comedy
revels in delayed revelation and in this latter scene, at least, Shakespeare
is drawing on the humour of the sluggish running slaves of Plautus.¹⁷
With Friar John, however, the gap between young and old creates the
fall into tragedy. In the first half of the play, Romeo and Juliet echoes
both the situation and the characters of Roman comedy, with its young
lovers who bear down the restraints of elderly parents who stand in
the way of their love. But after the deaths of Mercutio and Tybalt,
the variance between the young and old takes a tragic turn: the young
die and the old lose their children. Both the comic and tragic aspects
of age are crystallized in the second quarto. In Q2 Old Capulet is far
more of a pantaloon: his wife quips that he needs a crutch rather than
a sword (Q2 only, A4r14), and himself admits that he is too old for
quarrelling ‘and tis not hard I thinke, | For me so old as we to keepe
the peace’ (Q2 only, B2v9–10). Likewise his nostalgic remembrance of
his visor-wearing youth—‘tis gone, tis gone’—is also only present in
Q2 (C3r14–17). Nostalgia is part of the comic presentation of old men
(think of Justice Shallow), but Q2 also highlights the tragedic side of
old age.¹⁸ The mature women in the play, lamenting the death of those
they have nursed and loved, feel their approach to death accelerated by
suffering. The nurse, in the midst of the grief for Tybalt’s death says,
‘These griefs, these woes, these sorrows make me old’ (Q2 only, G2v21)
and Juliet’s mother, seeing her daughter’s body, says ‘this sight of death,
is as a Bell | That warns my old age to a sepulcher’ (Q2 only, L4v26).
Death is the absolute which underlies tragedy, but it is rendered pliable
in comedy. Susan Snyder has shown how in popular plays performed
before Romeo and Juliet resuscitations—such as the reappearance of
Emilia in Comedy of Errors, Sempronio in Knack to Know an Honest
Man, Dorothea in James the Fourth, and Jack in Peele’s Old Wives’
Tale —all belong to comedy.¹⁹ Through the device of the sleeping
potion death becomes something that can be controlled, and hence
¹⁷ Act 2 Scene 4 imitates the slow delivery of news by Pinacium in Stichus, Curculio in
Curculio, and, in particular, by Acanthio in Mercator: Plautus, trans. and ed. Paul Nixon,
The Loeb Classical Library (London: William Heinemann, 1916–38), v. ll. 274–401,
ii. ll. 280–370, iii. ll. 111–224. See also Franklin M. Dickey, Not Wisely but Too Well:
Shakespeare’s Love Tragedies (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1957), 74–5.
¹⁸ For this characteristic of old men in comedy, see Marvin T. Herrick, Comic Theory
in the Sixteenth Century (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1950), 154.
¹⁹ Susan Snyder, The Comic Matrix of Shakespeare’s Tragedies: Romeo and Juliet,
Hamlet, Othello and King Lear (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 20–1.
a central aspect of Romeo and Juliet’s plot is attuned to comedy.
Snyder argues that the turning point away from comedy occurs with
the first real death, the death of Mercutio.²⁰ The mood of the play
certainly changes with his demise; however, Snyder underestimates
the extent to which comedic elements are kept in play. Mercutio’s
most famous pun is uttered even as he is dying and the nurse’s
doubles entendres outlive both Mercutio and Tybalt. Juliet retains
her comedic role as a witty female in her double-edged repartee
with Paris outside Friar Lawrence’s cell and the humorous servants,
who populate the first act, resurface in Act 4: drawing Old Capulet
into banter at the beginning of 4. 2 and 4. 4, and then perform-
ing their own comic riff after the rhetorical excesses of the mourning
scene. This scene itself has many comic possibilities, and for an audi-
ence expecting a happy ending Friar Lawrence’s long-winded speech
reads as comic suspense rather than the delay of tragic inevitabil-
ity.²¹ Shakespeare teases his audience with the possibility of an averted
catastrophe up to the moment Romeo kills himself—for example in
the otherwise gratuitous death of Paris, which means that the suitor
favoured by old Capulet no longer stands as a threat to the young
lovers.²²
Aristotle writes that pity and fear are evoked when events ‘happen
contrary to expectation but because of one another’.²³ This thwarting of
expectation is precisely what Shakespeare achieves in Romeo and Juliet.
As Snyder has argued: ‘by evoking the world where lovers always win,
death always loses, and nothing is irrevocable, a dramatist can set up false
expectations of a comic resolution so as to reinforce by sharp contrast
the movement into tragic inevitability’.²⁴ Shakespeare uses the comic
matrix of his tragedy, therefore, to create the illusion that the young
lovers may yet reconcile the families without having to be sacrificed.
The comedic aspects of the plot are part of its tragic pleasure, and
Shakespeare sustains them until the bitter end.
²⁰ Snyder, Comic Matrix, 62.

²¹ James Forse, ‘Arden of Faversham and Romeo and Juliet: Two Elizabethan Experi-
ments in the Genre of ‘‘Comedy-Suspense’’ ’, Journal of Popular Culture 29/3 (1995): 93;
Charles B. Lower, ‘Romeo and Juliet, Iv. V: A Stage Direction and Purposeful Comedy’,
²² E. Pearlman, ‘Shakespeare at Work: Romeo and Juliet’, English Literary Renaissance
24 (1994): 325–6.
²³ Aristotle, Poetics I, trans. and ed. Richard Janko (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987),
3. 3. 2.
²⁴ Snyder, Comic Matrix, 5.
The Easter allusions explored by this chapter are central to the
comedic strand of the play. Romeo’s propitious dream at the beginning
of Act 5, which is unique to Shakespeare’s version of the story, sustains
the hope of a happy ending and imputes to Juliet a quasi-divine
power:
I dreamt my lady came and found me dead
· · · · · · ·
And breathed such life with kisses in my lips
That I revived and was an emperor. (5. 1. 6–9)
Romeo imagines that Juliet can bring him back from the dead, and
his description of her power is a pre-echo of Isabella’s description of
Christ’s salvation: ‘and mercy then will breathe within your lips, | like
man new made’ (Measure for Measure, 2. 2. 80–1). Redemption is a
second creation of man in God’s image; Isabella’s words, and perhaps
Romeo’s too, are derived from the creation of Adam by God’s life-giving
breath (Gen. 2: 7).
One of the strongest and most thoroughgoing aspects of Romeo and
Juliet which highlights the possible religious connotations of the story
is the language in which the lovers address each other as ‘the god of my
idolatry’.²⁵ Romeo—as his name suggests²⁶—is a pilgrim to the shrine
of Juliet and the implications of this are punningly teased out in the
lovers’ first exchange:
 If I profane with my unworthiest hand
This holy shrine, the gentler sin is this:
My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand
To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss.
 Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much,
Which mannerly devotion shows in this.
For saints have hands that pilgrims’ hands do touch,
And palm to palm is holy palmers’ kiss.
 Have not saints lips, and holy palmers, too?
 Ay, pilgrim, lips that they must use in prayer.
 O then, dear saint, let lips do what hands do:
They pray; grant thou, lest faith turn to despair.
²⁵ For a recent discussion of Romeo and Juliet’s language of ‘incarnate spirituality’

see Graham Ward, True Religion (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 5–34.
²⁶ Florio defines ‘Romeo’ as ‘a roamer, a wanderer, a palmer’: John Florio, A Worlde
of Wordes, or Most copious, and exact Dictionarie in Italian and English (London, 1598),
Ee5r .
 Saints do not move, though grant for prayers’ sake.
 Then move not while my prayer’s effect I take.
(1. 5. 92–105)
The conversation takes the form of a shared sonnet and is phrased in the
religious terminology popular in contemporary sonnet sequences. The
language of saints, shrines, prayer, and pilgrims that Romeo and Juliet
use here was in vogue not only among sonneteers but among many
early modern poets and Shakespeare’s other lovers frequently speak in
a similar vein.²⁷ The Catholicism of saints and shrines may have led
to such language being heard as romantic rather than blasphemous;
however, some sonneteers moved beyond the possibly deconsecrated
language of Catholicism to describe their love in terms reminiscent of
biblical descriptions of Christ, or God the Father.²⁸ Romeo and Juliet
behave likewise: when Romeo asks his love what he should swear by,
she replies:
Do not swear at all,
Or if thou wilt, swear by thy gracious self,
Which is the god of my idolatry,
And I’ll believe thee. (2. 1. 154–7)
With these impulsive words Juliet not only overturns Christ’s injunction,
which she has just quoted—‘Sweare not at all’ (Matthew 5: 34)—but
she also instructs her ‘god’ to follow the action of God described in
Hebrews: ‘for when God made the promises to Abraham, because
hee had no greater to sweare by, he sware by him selfe’ (6: 13).²⁹
Shakespeare is not alone in such daring biblical allusions, but he does
make particularly striking use of them in this play. When Romeo says to
Juliet ‘call me but love, and I’ll be new baptized’ (2. 1. 92) he imputes a
godlike power to her: just by speaking that name ‘love’, she will baptize
him anew. When he tells Friar Laurence ‘her I love now | Doth grace for
grace and love for love allow’ (2. 2. 85–6), he describes Juliet’s return
²⁷ See All’s Well That Ends Well, 1. 1. 96–7; The Two Gentlemen of Verona,
2. 4. 127 ff.; Margaret Aston, England’s Iconoclasts: Laws Against Images (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1988), 466–7. Helen Hackett fully and subtly explores this language
in contemporary sonnet sequences in ‘The Art of Blasphemy?’.
²⁸ See Resolved to Love: The 1592 Edition of Henry Constable’s Diana Critically
Considered, ed. Robert F. Fleissner (Salzburg: University of Salzburg, 1980), sonnets 4,
7, 15; Michael Drayton, The Works of Michael Drayton, ed. J. William Hebel (Oxford:
Basil Blackwell, 1961), i, sonnets 12, 19, 29.
²⁹ Shaheen, Biblical References in Shakespeare’s Plays, 513.
of his affection in the biblical language of Christ’s giving himself to
humanity: ‘and of his fulnesse haue all we receiued, and grace for grace’
(John 1: 16).³⁰
These moments, like all the religious allusions so far discussed, are
present in both the early texts of the play. However, the Easter nuances,
latent in the story which centres on the resuscitation of the protagonist
in a tomb, and brought out by Shakespeare through biblical echoes and
sacred descriptions of erotic love, are rendered more prominent in the
second quarto.
The status of the first quarto of Romeo and Juliet is a matter of
scholarly debate. New Bibliographers argued that Q1 was a memorial
reconstruction by an actor attempting to remember the manuscript
underlying Q2. It was therefore considered not to be authorial, and could
be dismissed by the textual critic. Recent criticism, however, has shown
that there are a number of problems with memorial reconstruction as
a theory in general and with its bearings on this text in particular.
Laurie Maguire has argued that the textual disturbance caused by
an actor’s faulty memory is difficult to identify because it is often
identical with that caused by scribes, compositors, revising authors,
or adapters. Peter Blayney has debunked a central tenet of the theory
of memorial reconstruction, in which the short quartos were ‘stolne,
and surreptitious copies’, by showing that no printer would have been
eager to pirate Shakespeare’s work.³¹ Lucas Erne has likewise recently
suggested that Q1 Romeo and Juliet, along with other ‘bad quartos’, is
the product ‘of a more authorized and communal undertaking than has
often been assumed’.³² A reader or director approaching Q1 Romeo and
Juliet as a text in its own right is unlikely to consider it as deficient.
It plays particularly well and is fast paced and coherent.³³ Despite
being a considerably shorter text, 92 per cent of Q1’s lines are roughly
³⁰ Sims, Dramatic Uses of Biblical Allusions, 46.

³¹ Harry Hoppe, The Bad Quarto of Romeo and Juliet: A Bibliographical and Textual
Study (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1948); Laurie Maguire, Shakespearean
Suspect Texts: The ‘Bad’ Quartos and their Contexts (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1996), 155–211; Blayney, ‘The Publication of Playbooks’, 389–94.
³² Lukas Erne, Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2003), 218.
³³ For a discussion of Q1 as ‘an excellent acting text’ see Michael Mooney, ‘Text and
Performance: Romeo and Juliet, Quartos One and Two’, Colby Quarterly 26/2 (1990):
124; Pascale Aebischer, ‘Looking for Shakespeare: The Textuality of Performance’, in
Lukas Erne and Guillemette Bulens, eds., The Limits of Textuality (Tübingen: Gunter
Narr, 2000), 168. Pascale Aebischer directed Q1 in 1998; my grateful thanks to her for
discussing its theatrical virtues with me.
equivalent to lines in Q2. This has lead to the idea that Q1 is a
deliberately cut play-text. There are a number of speeches that sound
truncated, and of more than eight hundred lines unique to Q2, around
five hundred occur in blocks of at least four lines.³⁴ The first quarto
shows signs of redaction, but this alone is not sufficient to explain
the differences between the two earliest quartos. The alternative, and
older, explanation—that the early quartos record Shakespeare’s first
thoughts and the later printings his revisions—has lately been regaining
currency.
A number of critics have suggested examples of minor, lexical variants
between Q1 and Q2, which add depth or interest to the text and hence
seem to suggest Shakespearean revision. Jay Halio, for example, argues
that the small differences in the Queen Mab speech are authorial.³⁵ Grace
Ioppolo likewise posits that in the process of transferring the ‘grey-eyed
morne’ speech from the Friar to Romeo Shakespeare appears to have
introduced minor second-thought variants.³⁶ Such analysis supports
more ambitious arguments which suggest that single word alterations
are themed in such a way as to promote an alternative reading of the
text. Steven Urkowitz, for example, has shown that the final scene of
Act 2 (where the two texts diverge completely) has been entirely altered
in tone as well as content. He argues that Shakespeare has revised the
meeting between Romeo and Juliet in Friar Lawrence’s cell so that a
scene which in Q1 ‘rings exuberantly’ has been transformed into one
which ‘tolls ominously’. Yaship Bains has shown how the death scene
of Mercutio has been entirely reconceived in a way which changes his
characterization. Katherine Duncan-Jones argues that the references to
plague in Q1 are consistently absent in Q2, so that a terrifying reality
becomes no more than a vague threat.³⁷
³⁴ David Farley-Hills, ‘The ‘‘Bad’’ Quarto of Romeo and Juliet’, Shakespeare Survey 49
(1996): 28–31; Kathleen Irace, Reforming the ‘Bad’ Quartos: Performance and Provenance
of Six Shakespearean First Editions (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1994), 142.
³⁵ Jay L. Halio, ‘Handy-Dandy: Q1/Q2 Romeo and Juliet’, in Jay L. Halio, ed.,
Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet: Texts, Contexts and Interpretation (Newark: University of
Delaware Press, 1995), 135. See also David Farley-Hill’s suggestion that the Prologue
was invented by the redactor of Q1, and Q2’s prologue is Shakespeare’s revision of the
interpolation: Farley-Hills, ‘The ‘‘Bad’’ Quarto of Romeo and Juliet’, 34, 43.
³⁶ Ioppolo, Revising Shakespeare, 90.
³⁷ Steven Urkowitz, ‘Two Versions of Romeo and Juliet 2.6 and Merry Wives of
Windsor 5.5.215–45: An Invitation to the Pleasures of Textual/Sexual Di(Per)versity’, in
R. B. Parker and S. P.Zitner, eds., Elizabethan Theater: Essays in Honor of S. Schoenbaum
(Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1996), 229; Yaship Singh Bains, Making Sense
The main problem with the traditional argument that Q1 is
Shakespeare’s original text and he revised it to create Q2 is the
widespread agreement that Q1 is set from a prompt book and Q2
from foul papers. This is suggested by the latter’s permissive stage
directions, unstable speech prefixes, unmarked entrances and exits, and
‘false-starts’, which are not present in Q1. A possible reading of the
differences between the two texts, which reconciles Q2’s advert ‘newly
corrected, augmented, and amended’ with the universally accepted idea
of foul paper copy for Q2, is that two years after Q1 had been printed,
Romeo and Juliet was popular enough to warrant a new printing. Q1
had been set from the prompt book, which had been formed from a
fair copy cut for performance. For the second printing, however, the
uncut foul papers are used as the copy-text. Before the papers were
sent off to the printer Shakespeare looked over his script and tinkered
with it. He revised the stress and tone of the play through the addition
of the odd line, altering the occasional word or phrase and rewriting
Act 2 Scene 6 entirely. Nevill Coghill describes the revisions in Othello
in terms of Shakespeare’s return to and alteration of something with
which he was dissatisfied.³⁸ One of the aspects of Romeo and Juliet that
Shakespeare returned to the play to alter may have been the submerged
Easter narrative. In the revised text, perhaps, he determined to draw it
nearer to the surface.
Studying Romeo and Juliet in its unconflated texts leads to an
illumination of the Easter motif, because of minor variants that are
focused precisely on this theme. The divergence is apparent from the
opening scene in which Q1 lacks Benvolio and Tybalt’s dialogue in the
first brawl. This means that Benvolio’s echo of Christ’s words as he is
nailed to the cross ‘they know not what they do’ (Luke 23: 34)—‘you
know not what you do’ (A3v 36)—is only present in Q2. This line
carries with it an unmistakable overtone of the paschal story and it is in
keeping with the text as a whole that it should not be present in Q1,
which downplays the sacred aspect of the narrative.
Although Shakespeare has removed his sources’ direct references to
Easter, liturgical festivals are constantly alluded to throughout both texts.
of the First Quartos of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, Henry V, Merry Wives of Windsor
and Hamlet (Shimla: Indian Institute of Advanced Study, 1995), 27; Katherine Duncan-
Jones, ‘William Shakespeare: Romeo and Juliet ed. Jill Levenson’, Review of English Studies
52 (2001): 447.
³⁸ Coghill, Shakespeare’s Professional Skills, 200.
The Nurse and Old Capulet both use them to measure time: the nurse
repeatedly relates that Juliet was born on Lammas eve (1. 3. 15–23)
and Capulet says it is twenty-five years since he wore a mask ‘Come
Pentecost as quicklie as it will’ (1. 5. 36).³⁹ It is only in Q2, however,
that the love affair is described in relation to the liturgical year. In Q2,
as Juliet keeps watch for Romeo, she likens herself to one waiting for a
holy day:
So tedious is this day,
As is the night before some festiuall,
To an impatient child that hath new robes
And may not weare them. (Gv 27)
The image of a child’s clothes is suited to Juliet’s half-way state. She is
no longer a child precisely because she is about to be covered by a man,
as Donne has it: ‘To night put on perfection, and a womans name’.⁴⁰
Juliet’s apprehension of her marital consummation as a holy day is
in keeping with her Q2 characterization. Juliet, who is central to the
paschal theme, undergoes one of the most striking changes between Q1
and Q2.⁴¹ Juliet’s rich mental life, expressed in Q2 through her erotic
soliloquy as she waits for her new husband to arrive and her internal
struggle before she drinks the potion, is downplayed in Q1 in which
these speeches are absent or appear in a shortened form. In keeping with
her smaller role, Q1’s Juliet does not have the active religious life that her
Q2 counterpart does. For example, it is only in Q2 that Juliet’s language
shows traces of the Book of Common Prayer. When Juliet describes
how the news of Romeo’s banishment ‘presses to my memorie, | Like
damned guiltie deeds to sinners mindes’ (Q2 only, G3r 7), her words
recall the general confession of the Communion service, in which the
penitent states: ‘the remembrance of them is grievous unto us, the
burthen of them is intolerable’. Juliet’s simile is the product of a mind
used to conceiving of sin as a weight pressing on the memory. Likewise,
in Q1 Juliet seeks the help of the Friar to solve what is a secular problem
³⁹ See also 2. 3. 127, 5. 1. 57. For the festive associations of July, the month in which
the play is set, see Philippa Berry, ‘Between Idolatry and Astrology: Modes of Temporal
Repetition in Romeo and Juliet’, in Dympna Callaghan, ed., A Feminist Companion to
Shakespeare (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 360–3, 368–9.
⁴⁰ The refrain of ‘Epithalamion made at Lincoln’s Inn’: The Poems of John Donne:
Edited from the Old Editions and Numerous Manuscripts, ed. Herbert J. C. Grierson
(London: Oxford University Press, 1953), i. 141–4.
⁴¹ For the relevance of alteration of a central character to a theory of authorial revision,
see Werstine, ‘The Textual Mystery of Hamlet’, 11.
of keeping faith with Romeo. By contrast in Q2 she is distressed about
breaking faith with God as well as her husband (Iv 20), and tells the
Friar: ‘God ioynd my heart, and Romeos thou our hands’ (Q2 only,
I3r 7), echoing of the Book of Common Prayer’s marriage service: ‘then
shall the Priest ioyne their hands together, and say. Those whome God
hath ioyned together, let no man put asunder.’⁴² Unique to Q2 likewise
are her lines about the state of sin that bigamy would entail:
 I haue need of many orysons,
To moue the heauens to smile vpon my state,
Which well thou knowest, is crosse and full of sin. (I4v 23)
In both texts Juliet is estranged from her nurse because of her advice
that she should marry Paris, but it is only in Q2 that the sacred fiat
against bigamy weighs on Juliet’s mind along with the impossibility of
deserting Romeo. To preserve herself from a forced marriage she drinks
the potion, is believed to be dead, and is ‘laid into the Tombe’ (Q2
only, Kr 16), from which she hopes to rise again to a blessed life with
Romeo. As the climax of Q2 draws closer the hopes and fears of the
paschal story crowd in upon the text.
The catalyst for the catastrophe is the proposed marriage of Juliet to
Paris. Shakespeare has darkened her parents’ motives from the sources
in which, miserable at their daughter’s month-long weeping at (as they
think) the death of her cousin, they determine on a marriage to make
her happy. Even so her father is hesitant to marry her so young. In one
source he objects: ‘scarce saw she yet full xvi’, and in the other that: ‘sith
as yet she is not attained to the age of eighteen years, I thought to provide
a husband at leisure’. Juliet’s youth is also sharply out of line with the
normal marrying age of a woman in late sixteenth-century England,
which was their early twenties.⁴³ Despite these changes the Capulets
in Q1 are not entirely forcing their daughter against her will. Steven
Urkowitz has pointed out how, in the scene in which Lady Capulet
⁴² The Booke of Common prayer, and administration of the Sacraments, and other Rites
and Ceremonies in the Church of England (London, 1590), Nr , O8v . Shaheen notes both
these Prayer Book references, although he does not mention that they are unique to
Q2: Shaheen, Biblical References in Shakespeare’s Plays, 517, 520. For evidence of the
popularity of, and familiarity of the populace with, the Book of Common Prayer in early
modern England see Judith Maltby, Prayer Book and People in Elizabethan and Early
Stuart England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 33, 44–5, 118–19.
⁴³ Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources, i. l. 1860; Painter, Romeo and Julietta,
75; Ingram, Church Courts, 129.
first introduces the match to her daughter, the variants between Q1 and
Q2 systematically increase the coercive pressure of the mother.⁴⁴ When
the marriage with Paris is urged the second time, the parents are again
harsher in Q2. In Q1, Old Capulet is described as ‘pittying’ (G4r 30) his
daughter’s sorrow. Q2 omits this word and when the argument between
father and daughter comes his anger is harsher and more sarcastic.
The climax in the divergence in Juliet’s treatment by her parents
comes as Capulet prepares for his daughter’s wedding day, unaware that
she is lying like death in her room. In Q1 he cries:
Make hast, make hast, for it is almost day,
The Curfewe bell hath rung, t’is foure a clocke. (Ir 17)
The father is not such a guilty man in this text and his words here
are ominous only in that the audience knows that sorrow awaits him.
In Q2, however, at this moment the old man is cast as the unwitting
Peter in this Passion story. Shakespeare has altered his source to make
Peter a prominent name. The church at which Juliet was to be married
is dedicated to St Peter instead of St Francis (as it was in Brooke) and
Juliet swears she will not marry Paris: ‘by Saint Peter’s Church, and
Peter too’ (3. 5. 116). St Peter’s is the name of the church at which
Old Capulet was to have betrayed his child into a loveless marriage, and
Peter is the name of the servant who, in Q2, he repeatedly names in this
scene (Kv 29–31).
In Q2 Capulet enters saying:
Come stir, stir, stir, the second Cock hath crowed.
The Curphew bell hath roong, tis three a clock. (Kv 12)
The second line is almost identical with Q1—‘the Curfewe bell hath
rung, t’is foure a clocke’—with only a single change in the time from
four to three o’clock. John Jones’s excellent work on the insistent
number changes in King Lear argues that they are a sign of the author’s
mind ‘fidgeting and tinkering as he attends to a mental itch which is
also a symptom of something else’.⁴⁵ I think this is true of this number
⁴⁴ Steven Urkowitz, ‘Five Women Eleven Ways: Changing Images of Shakespearean

Characters in the Earliest Texts’, in D. J. Palmer, Werner Habicht, and Roger Pringle,
eds., Images of Shakespeare: Proceedings of the Third Congress of the International Shakespeare
Association, 1986 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1988), 298–9.
⁴⁵ Jones, Shakespeare at Work, 176.
change too. ‘Three a clock’ is a portentous time in a way that four is
not. It is the time at which Christ died.⁴⁶
The alteration of the time is accompanied by a change in the way
the time is heralded: ‘the second Cock hath crowed’.⁴⁷ At the sound
of the second cock crow, Peter realized that he had denied Christ, and
Capulet is heading for a similar awakening. Mark is the only Gospel
that has the cock crow twice, but this is the more dramatically effective
version, as it makes the listener forcibly aware that Jesus’ prophecy is
about to come true. The stage directions of N-town play 29 (‘Et cantabit
gallus … Et cantabit gallus … and Petyr xal wepyn’) and Jesus’ prophecy
in the Towneley cycle (‘or the cok have crowen twyse, | Thou shall deny
me tymes thre’) show that in these cycles the second cock crow was
certainly staged. We cannot be sure about the Coventry play, but the
accounts do record a payment for ‘cokcroing’.⁴⁸
This aspect of St Peter’s story had also been dwelt on in Southwell’s
poem Saint Peter’s Complaint, in which three verses are dedicated to the
cock crow.⁴⁹ This poem came out almost immediately after Southwell’s
execution in 1595, and it went through three editions in that year
alone. Despite being written by a Catholic priest, the book found
popularity among all denominations, and it would have been surprising
if Shakespeare had not known about one of the most talked-about
poems of the year.⁵⁰ Southwell’s poetic meditation on Peter’s betrayal
of Christ spawned numerous imitations and made the topic highly
fashionable both at the time Shakespeare wrote Romeo and Juliet, and
during its early performances.⁵¹ The double cock crow in Q2 gives
that text a sense of expectation, and of dread, not present in Q1. The
⁴⁶ For another example in which 3 o’clock might carry this significance in Shakespeare,
see Steve Sohmer, Shakespeare’s Mystery Play: The Opening of the Globe Theatre 1599
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), 96.
⁴⁷ The curfew bells, which are mentioned in both texts, also had a festal association,
see Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, 40.
⁴⁸ The N-Town Play, 29. 198, 212; The Towneley Plays, ed. Martin Stevens and A. C.
Cawley, 2 vols.,  13 and 14 (Oxford: Early English Text Society, 1994), xx. 452–3;
Ingram, Coventry, 289.
⁴⁹ Robert Southwell, Saint Peters Complaint, with other Poemes (London, 1595), Ev .
⁵⁰ Some critics have thought the connection closer than this. One version has a prose
dedication to ‘W.S.’, and there are possible puns on Venus and Adonis and Shakespeare’s
name in the dedicatory poem. For an overview of this theory see Alison Shell, ‘Why
Didn’t Shakespeare Write Religious Verse?’, in Takashi Kozuka and J. R. Mulryne, eds.,
Shakespeare, Marlowe, Jonson: New Directions in Biography (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006),
85–112. My grateful thanks to Alison Shell for giving me a copy of this essay.
⁵¹ Alison Shell, Catholicism, Controversy and the English Literary Imagination, 1558–
1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 57–79.
audience becomes aware of the sorrow that is inherent in the father’s
bustling joy.
As far as the world is aware Juliet has died, but there are some who are
hopeful that she will come back to life. When the Friar comes to open
the tomb, Q2 draws parallels (absent from Q1) with Christ’s sepulchre
on Easter morning. The Q2 stage directions detail that the Friar should
carry ‘Lanthorne, Crowe and Spade’ (L3v 1), implements that mark him
as ready to open a tomb, which like the women on Easter morning, he
will find already open. With a cry he says:
Alack alack, what bloud is this which staines
The stony entrance of this sepulchre? (L3v 26)
In the New Testament the word ‘sepulchre’ is associated with just one
thing: the Easter tomb. The Gospels in the Geneva Bible use ‘sepulchre’
thirty-seven times and only referring to Christ’s tomb. The word is not
present in Q1, which has instead:
What bloud is this that staines the entrance
Of this marble stony monument? (K2r 25)
In Shakespeare ‘sepulchre’ can simply refer to a tomb, but it is noticeable
that the word is present in two of his rare, explicitly pious references
to Christianity. Henry IV speaks of leading a crusade ‘to the sepulchre
of Christ’ to fight under his ‘blessèd cross’ (1 Henry IV, 1. 1. 19–20),
and Gaunt’s paean to England includes a reference to her soldiers who
are famed as far away ‘as is the sepulchre, in stubborn Jewry, | Of the
world’s ransom, blessèd Mary’s son’ (Richard II, 2. 1. 55–56). The
sacred resonance of the word may be the reason that it is used in Q2 to
describe Juliet’s tomb.
Until Elizabeth’s reign the Easter liturgy in England centred on a
sepulchre built inside the church. The Easter sepulchre appeared in
churches in the south of the country around the tenth century and by
the sixteenth century they were present in the overwhelming majority
of urban parishes.⁵² It is possible that Shakespeare and some of his
audience could have been aware of the liturgical ceremonies associated
with the sepulchre. At the beginning of the Reformation, Henry allowed
the ancient customs of the imposition of ashes on Ash Wednesday, the
carrying of palms on Palm Sunday, the Easter sepulchre, and creeping
the cross to continue ‘as good and laudable things to put us in memory
⁵² Hutton, Rise and Fall of Merry England, 52–3.

of what they signify’, and the Easter sepulchre was never specifically
forbidden by Royal Injunctions under Henry or Edward. Nonetheless
it is clear from the rebuilding of sepulchres carried out under Mary that
many were destroyed, and Cranmer’s Articles for Canterbury Diocese
(1548) pursues clergy who ‘upon Good Friday last’ used ‘the sepulchres
with their lights, having the Sacrament therein’.⁵³
Under Mary, Easter ceremonial such as the veiling of the rood, the
lighting of the paschal candle, and creeping the cross were enforced
by visitations, and the lack of prosecutions suggests that such physical
aspects of the Easter liturgy were widely readopted.⁵⁴ The enthusiastic
support for the sepulchre during Mary’s reign does not always show a
comparable diminishment at her death. In Ludlow, for example, the
only difference between the accounts for the setting-up of the sepulchre
in the last years of Mary’s reign and the beginning of Elizabeth’s is,
surprisingly, that the latter involves far more expensive and elaborate
rites, despite the government’s attempts to suppress the sepulchre.⁵⁵ In
the neighbouring diocese to Shakespeare’s, a year after his birth, the
clergy were ordered to ‘abolish and put away clean out of your church
all monuments of idolatry and superstition, as … sepulchres which were
used on Good Friday’.⁵⁶ Bishop Bentham was right in suspecting
that clergy and parishioners were hoarding their Easter sepulchres, for
evidence of them remains to this day in at least sixteen Warwickshire
churches.⁵⁷ Most stone sepulchres were never entirely destroyed, and
an inventory of 1566 shows that many had kept even the wooden
structures too. A dismantled sepulchre frame turns up in an inventory
for St Michael’s, Chester as late as the 1590s.⁵⁸ There is also evidence
of Easter sepulchre ceremonies which began to be practised as folk
ritual after they had been banned by the Church. In Pembrokeshire, for
example, ‘Christ’s bed’ was made on Good Friday by weaving a figure
⁵³ Frere, Visitation Articles, ii. 38, 183–5; Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, 461.
⁵⁴ Hutton, The Rise and Fall of Merry England, 97.
⁵⁵ Churchwardens’ Accounts of the Town of Ludlow, in Shropshire, from 1540 to the end
of the reign of Queen Elizabeth, ed. Thomas Wright (London: Camden Society, 1869),
86, 91–2.
⁵⁶ Frere, Visitation Articles, iii. 169.
⁵⁷ Clifford Davidson and Jennifer Alexander, The Early Art of Coventry, Stratford-
Upon-Avon, Warwick and Lesser Sites in Warwickshire: A Subject List of Extant and Lost
Art Including Items Relevant to Early Drama (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Medieval Institute
Publications, 1985), 32, 91–2, 132–3.
⁵⁸ Pamela Sheingorn, The Easter Sepulchre in England (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Medieval
Institute Publications, 1987), 52; Ingram, Coventry, 65, 69, 73.
out of reeds and laying it solemnly, together with a cross, in a concealed
place in the countryside.⁵⁹
As such survivals show, the Easter sepulchre was a popular part of the
liturgy and it lived on in people’s memories as well as being memorialized
in stone. In the late sixteenth century Roger Martin wrote an account of
the liturgy of his youth: ‘In the quire, there was a fair painted frame
of timber, to be set up about Maundy Thursday, with holes for a number
of fair tapers to stand in before the sepulchre, and to be lighted in service
time … the sepulchre being placed, and finely garnished, at the north
end of the high altar.’⁶⁰ Another account, written in 1593, recalls how
the sepulchre in a church in Durham was ‘sett upp in the morninge, on
the north side of the Quire, nigh to the High Altar … all covered with
red velvett and embrodered with gold’ and describes how, at the Good
Friday service there were ‘two tapers lighted before it, which tapers did
burne unto Easter day’.⁶¹
A liturgical drama was created in and around the sepulchre in which
the host and a cross were ‘buried’ on Good Friday (the depositio) and
raised on Easter day (the elevatio), after which the empty tomb was
visited by the three Marys and the disciples (the visitatio sepulchri).
Scholars have long argued that the dramatic revival in medieval England
grew out of the third part of this liturgy, the visitatio sepulchri and
the quem quaeritis.⁶² Even though this view is no longer accepted, the
liturgy of the sepulchre was certainly intensely dramatic, both during
Easter and at Corpus Christi, when Miri Rubin has described it as the
site at which drama and eucharistic practices merged.⁶³ The sepulchre
⁵⁹ Hutton, ‘The English Reformation’, 102. See 101–4 for other examples of Easter
sepulchre ceremonies which survived outside the church.
⁶⁰ David Dymond and Clive Paine, The Spoil of Melford Church: The Reformation in
a Suffolk Parish (Ipswich: Salient Press, 1992), 3–6, 61; Bevington, Medieval Drama, 33.
⁶¹ A Description or Briefe Declaration of all the Ancient Monuments, Rites, and Customes
Belonginge, beinge within the Monastical Church of Durham Before the Suppression, ed.
James Raine (London: J. B. Nichols, 1842), 10. For another contemporary account
of the Easter sepulchre see Philips van Marnix van St. Aldegonde, The Bee hiue of the
Romishe Churche, trans. George Gilpin (London, 1579), Cc8v –Ddr .
⁶² Young, Dramatic Associations. For the critique of this idea, see O. B. Hardison,
Christian Rite and Christian Drama in the Middle Ages: Essays in the Origin and Early
History of Modern Drama (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965), 12–13;
David A. Bjork, ‘On the Dissemination of Quem quaeritis and the visitatio sepulchri
and the Chronology of Their Early Sources’, in C. J. Gianakaris, John H. Stroupe, and
Clifford Davidson, eds., The Drama of the Middle Ages: Comparative and Critical Essays
(New York: AMS, 1982), 1–24.
⁶³ Rubin, Corpus Christi, 294–7. See also Gibson, The Theatre of Devotion, 93.
was the dramatic focus of the Easter liturgy: curtains and lights were
erected round it, and the story which it symbolized was re-enacted.
When the Friar arrives at Juliet’s tomb, he is shocked (like the women
in the visitatio sepulchri) to find the ‘sepulchre’ already open and light
shining out of it (5. 3. 125–7, 135).⁶⁴ In the Bible there are bright
angels in the empty tomb and in the Chester Resurrection light pours out
of the tomb, blinding the watch: ‘Alas, what ys thys great light | shyninge
here in my sight?’ (18. 210–11). Light surrounding or emanating from
Juliet’s tomb could also have been reminiscent of the Easter sepulchre,
and Q2 highlights this aspect of the staging. Throughout both versions
Romeo describes Juliet in terms of the Christian iconography of light:
‘It is the east, and Juliet is the sun’ (2. 1. 45).⁶⁵ However, the final light
imagery, uttered at the tomb, occurs only in Q2:
 A Graue, O no. A Lanthorne slaughtred youth:
For here lies Iuliet,and her bewtie makes
This Vault a feasting presence full of light. (L2v 34)
Here the image of a darkened hall, lit by lanterns for late night feasting,
slides into a profane refraction of the final feasting place of the blest in
a heaven irradiated by the glory of God.⁶⁶
In Romeo’s imagery the radiance of Juliet’s beauty is an analogue
to the divine luminescence that shines out of the tomb in the biblical
accounts. As Romeo dies and leaves his light beside her, his metaphor
is actualized. The boy leading the others to the tomb says: ‘this is the
place there where the torch doth burne’ (Q2 only, L4r 22). The Easter
sepulchre was lit throughout holy week by the ‘sepulcre lyght’ and
the candles surrounding the sepulchre were one of the main focuses
of devotion to it: the commonest form of individual benefaction was
the endowment of wax to light the sepulchre during holy week. John
Garyngton of Mundon, Essex, for example, willed thirty ewes to his
⁶⁴ There is also another possible parallel: some versions of the visitatio sepulchri
elaborated on the Gospels to include an episode in which the Marys stopped to buy their
spices, before taking them to the sepulchre, just as Romeo stops to purchase drugs at the
apothecary before proceeding to Juliet’s tomb: E. K. Chambers, The English Folk Play
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1933), 165–8.
⁶⁵ For the importance of light imagery in the lovers’ descriptions of each other see
Caroline Spurgeon, Shakespeare’s Imagery and What It Tells Us (Cambridge: Cambridge
⁶⁶ ‘Lanthorn’ is a variant form of ‘lantern’, and at this time the word was ‘applied to
things metaphorically giving light. Formerly often of persons’, Oxford English Dictionary,
s.v. lantern. For a possible interpretation of ‘lanthorn’ as a type of candle-lit grave see
Gilian West, ‘Juliet’s Grave’, English Language Notes 28/1 (1990): 33–4.
parish church in 1517 to pay for ‘ij Tapurs brennyng yerely afore the
sepulchre at the fest of Easter as long as the worlde doth stande’.⁶⁷
It is probable that the stage property for Romeo’s ‘torch’ was likewise
some form of candle (the latter being used in open air theatres to
signify night).⁶⁸ The staging at this point in Q2 would, therefore, have
increased the resemblance between tomb and sepulchre. This effect has
been powerfully realized in one of the most famous film productions
of modern times. In Baz Lurhman’s William Shakespeare’s Romeo +
Juliet (1996) religious imagery is fetishized and nowhere more so than
in the ‘supersaturated religiosity of the Capulet tomb’. However, Peter
Donaldson has described how the thousands of candles which surround
Juliet in this production also highlight the sacrality of her resting place:
‘as shots proceed from wide shots to close-ups of Romeo, the myriad
candles shift function, from markers of excess to resonance with his
grief, and then, as we draw nearer still, to light sources, tender, [and]
appropriate’.⁶⁹
In addition to the candles at Juliet’s side, she is also curtained off, just
as the sepulchre would have been. According to Q1’s stage directions,
after Juliet has drunk the potion ‘she fals upon her bed within the
Curtaines’ (Ir 8). Then, after the lament over her body, ‘they all but the
Nurse goe foorth, casting Rosemary on her and shutting the Curtens’ (Q1
only, I2v 8). Shortly afterwards Paris enters and ‘strewes the Tomb with
flowers’ (Q1 only, I4v 9). Most critics believe that the early quartos can
give a guide to contemporary staging, and although caution needs to
be exercised over this assumption, it is likely, if this is how the play
was staged, that the flower-strewn bed and the flower-strewn tomb are
one.⁷⁰ There are no stage directions for moving Juliet, and the careful
⁶⁷ Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, 34; Pamela Sheingorn, ‘ ‘‘No Sepulchre on Good
Friday’’: The Impact of the Reformation on the Easter Rites of England’, in Clifford
Davidson and Ann Elijenhom Nichols, eds., Iconoclasm vs. Art and Drama (Kalamazoo,
Mich.: Medieval Institute Publications, 1989), 161.
⁶⁸ Gurr, Shakespearean Stage, 198; R. B. Graves, Lighting the Shakespearean Stage
1567–1642 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999), 204.
⁶⁹ Peter S. Donaldson, ‘ ‘‘In Fair Verona’’: Media, Spectacle, and Performance in
William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet’, in Richard Burt, ed., Shakespeare after Mass Media
(New York: Palgrave, 2002), 67, 79, and passim.
⁷⁰ Alan Dessen is the strongest advocate of this theory; see his ‘Q1 Romeo and
Juliet and Elizabethan Theatrical Vocabulary’, in Jay L. Halio, ed., Shakespeare’s Romeo
and Juliet: Texts, Contexts and Interpretation (Newark: University of Delaware Press,
1995), 107–22. However, for the contrary view see Paul Werstine, ‘Touring and the
Construction of Shakespeare Textual Criticism’, in Laurie E. Maguire and Thomas
L. Berger, eds., Textual Formations and Reformations (Newark: University of Delaware
curtaining of her body suggests that she has remained on stage, shielded
from the action either by the drapes of her bed, or behind the arras,
until ‘Romeo opens the tombe’ (Q1 only, Kr 24) by drawing back the
curtains.⁷¹ This curtaining-off of Juliet’s tomb/bed connects it with the
Easter sepulchre, which was likewise carefully shielded. The accounts
of St Matthew’s, Friday Street, London, for 1547–8, record a payment
of nine shillings ‘receyved of Mr. Beche for ij curtyns whiche hong
about the sepulker, sold within the tyme of this accompt’. Likewise the
accounts of St Michael’s, Bedwardine, Worcester, for 1547, record two
pence paid ‘for wyer for the Curteynes for the Sepulter at Easter’. As this
wire suggests, it seems that the curtains were fixed in such a way that
they could be drawn to conceal or reveal the contents of the sepulchre:
‘item ij blew Cortyns [to] draw afore the sepulture; iij Cortyns of launde
to draw afore the sepulture on the ester holy days’.⁷²
Flowers, such as those which the Nurse strews on Juliet’s bed,
and Paris strews on her grave, were likewise a ubiquitous part of the
decoration of the Easter sepulchre. The anti-Catholic satire, Regnum
Papisticum, translated in 1570, describes the rites at the Easter sepulchre
thus:
And frankensence and sweete perfumes before the bread doth burne:
With tapers all the people come, and at the barriars stay,
Where downe upon their knees they fall, and night and day they pray:
And violets and every kinde of flowres about the graue
They straw.⁷³
The candles, curtain, and flowers surrounding Juliet may all have
recalled an Easter sepulchre, but the strongest connection with that
liturgical object is perhaps that, as discussed above, Juliet’s tomb is also
Press, 1998), 45–66. John Jowett has persuasively argued that the stage directions of Q1
are probably derived from the printing house: ‘Henry Chettle and the First Quarto of
Romeo and Juliet’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 92/1 (1998): 53–74.
I am cautious, therefore, of arguing that Q1’s stage directions are accurate records of
sixteenth-century staging. However, even if they were written in the printing house, they
could still record a memory of performance.
⁷¹ A survey of the stage directions of early-modern plays suggests that the secretion of a
bed behind stage curtains, presumably in the discovery space, was a common device: Alan
C. Dessen and Leslie Thomson, eds., A Dictionary of Stage Directions in English Drama,
1580–1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), s.v. bed and discover.
⁷² Neil C. Brooks, ‘The Sepulchre of Christ in Art and Liturgy, with Special
Reference to Liturgical Drama’, University of Illinois Studies in Language and Literature
7/2 (1921): 81.
⁷³ Naogeorgus, Popish Kingdome, P3v .
her bed. In The Rape of Lucrece Shakespeare describes Lucrece’s head
as ‘entombèd’ between the hills of her pillow: ‘Where like a virtuous
monument she lies | To be admired of lewd unhallowed eyes’ (391–2).
Lucrece’s bed is described as a tomb to prefigure her death, and Juliet’s
tomb, conversely, is staged and described as a bed to convey the hope of
her rising to new life. Paris enters in Act 5 Scene 3 with flowers, which
could be brought either to sweeten a bridal bed, or to dress a corpse.
As Gertrude says as she throws blooms on Ophelia’s body: ‘I thought
thy bride-bed to have decked, sweet maid, | And not t’have strewed
thy grave’ (Hamlet, 5. 1. 242–3). Paris’s flowers express the equivocal
nature of this tomb as he reimagines it as her bridal bed: ‘sweet flower,
with flowers thy bridal bed I strew. | O woe! Thy canopy is dust and
stones’ (5. 3. 12–13).
Beds and graves were frequently twinned in religious texts for didactic
purposes. Lancelot Andrewes, for example, continuously stresses the
religious significance of the metaphor of sleeping for death and waking
for resurrection in his Easter sermons. In his 1606 Easter sermon on
Romans 6: 9—‘knowing that Christ being raised from the dead, dieth
no more, death hath no more dominion over him’—Andrewes wrote:
he said ‘death is … a fall … like to that of men into their bedds, when they
make accompt to stand up again’ … The very word which the Apostle useth
(εγ ερθεις —egertheis) implieth … a fall into a bed in our chamber; where
though we lye (to see to) little better than dead for a time; yet in the morning
we awake and stand up notwithstanding.74
The correlation between tombs and beds, which is created in Romeo and
Juliet to convey a hope of resurrection for Juliet, is present also in the
Easter sepulchre, a tomb which was known to be only temporary.
In the medieval and early Tudor period the Blessed Sacrament
was honoured with people’s most expensive possessions, which was
often their bed linen. People who lived along the route of the York
Corpus Christi procession were instructed by the civic order of 1544:
‘that every howseholdr that dwellith in the hye way ther as the sayd
procession procedith, shall hang before ther doores & forefrontes beddes
& coverynges of beddes of the best that they can gytt and strewe before
ther doores resshes and other suche fflowers’.⁷⁵ People also bequeathed
bedding to the sepulchre. In 1500 Henry Willyams willed to a church
⁷⁴ Lancelot Andrewes, XCVI Sermons (London, 1629), Nn3v .

⁷⁵ Johnston and Rogerson, York, i. 283.
in Stanford, ‘my coverlet to the use of the sepulcre’ and in the same
year Basilla Laxton left a bed-sheet to the same sepulchre.⁷⁶ Elizabeth
Hatfield, likewise, in 1509 bequeathed her arras bed to the parish church
in Hedon, York, to be used to cover her tomb on her year’s mind (the
anniversary of her death) and to adorn the sepulchre at Easter.⁷⁷ It was
no doubt the costliness of the bed linen that caused it to be donated
to the Easter sepulchre, but once the structure was swathed in coverlets
and sheets, and curtained off, it may have reminded the pious of a
bed—such as that in the Corpus Christi Carol—in which the Blessed
Sacrament was merely to sleep, to rise again on Easter day.⁷⁸
Elizabeth Hatfield’s bequest, in which her bed was used to adorn both
her tomb and the sepulchre, shows the powerful association between
the burial of ordinary men and women and that of the host at Easter.
Likewise, John Cheyne of Bedford willed in 1413 that the tapers that
burned beside his body during his funeral should ‘brenne to fore the
sepulcre from good freiday in to Esterday’.⁷⁹ The strongest symbol-
ism, however, occurred in churches whose permanent stone sepulchres
doubled as the tombs of wealthy patrons. These people had created a
resting place for themselves which would also be the sepulchre for the
host, and the tombs were adorned with Resurrection imagery which
interwove personal hopes with a visualization of the Gospel story.⁸⁰
This combination of an expensive tomb with the liturgical burial place
of Christ seems particularly resonant for Romeo and Juliet and strikingly
there is a fine example of one such sepulchre in the chancel of Holy
Trinity, Stratford, underneath Shakespeare’s mural. This is the tomb of
Dean Thomas Balsall, erected in the late fifteenth century, and decorated
⁷⁶ R. M. Serjeantson and H. Isham Longden, ‘The Parish Churches and Religious

Houses of Northamptonshire: Their Dedications, Altars, Images and Lights’, The
Archaelogical Journal 70/279 (1913): 229–30. An 1538 inventory for the Benedictine
Priory at Castle Hedingham, Essex, listed silk cloths and sheets for the sepulchre:
Sheingorn, ‘ ‘‘No Sepulchre on Good Friday’’ ’, 150.
⁷⁷ Brooks, ‘The Sepulchre of Christ’, 82.
⁷⁸ In the Corpus Christi Carol Christ’s bleeding body lies on a bed, which in the
different versions of the poem is draped variously with curtains, silk sheets, and red and
gold hangings (see above for the red and gold of the Durham sepulchre, 79). This bed
probably symbolizes the Easter sepulchre, see R. T. Davies, ed., Medieval English Lyrics: A
Critical Anthology (London: Faber & Faber, 1963), 272, 364. For the different versions,
see Richard L. Greene, ‘The Meaning of the Corpus Christi Carol’, Medium Aevum 29
(1960): 10–11.
⁷⁹ Sheingorn, ‘ ‘‘No Sepulchre on Good Friday’’ ’, 149.
⁸⁰ For examples, see Gibson, Theatre of Devotion, 93; Duffy, Stripping of the Altars,
30–7; Sheingorn, Easter Sepulchre, 28–52, 342.
with a frieze which leads chronologically from Jesus’ betrayal through
to the Resurrection appearance on the road to Emmaus.⁸¹ Although it
is very unlikely that this tomb was used as an Easter sepulchre during
Shakespeare’s boyhood, he might have been told about how, in the old
days, it had been swathed with rich cloths, decorated with flowers and
surrounded by lights at Easter. Dean Balsall’s monument was both his
final resting place and a temporary resting place for the host before
its ‘resurrection’ at the elevation; a site where the universal connection
between the little death (sleep) and the final sleep (death) was played out
in the hope that the patron’s death might be as short-lived as Christ’s. If
Juliet’s tomb was also her bed, draped with sumptuous clothes, strewn
with flowers, surrounded by candles and hidden by an arras until opened
by Romeo drawing the curtain back, then the Easter allusions in the
text would have been heightened by a strong visual parallel to the Easter
sepulchre.⁸²
The promise of resurrection, however, is subverted. Romeo and
Juliet’s love cannot triumph over death, and despite the reconciliation
of the two families, the hope of redemption that the allusion engenders
remains largely illusory. The alchemical promise of new life suggested by
the lovers’ embrace in the tomb is made painfully literal in the raising of
gold statues to the two dead lovers.⁸³ If Shakespeare’s audience, however,
had consciously or subconsciously recognized the Easter allusion it may
have connected in their mind with the other comedic possibilities of
the play. The comic wordplay with which the play begins—as servants
quibble over swords and maidenheads—belies the ostensible tragedy of
the play’s title and the prologue. The ambiguous tone of this ‘Conceited
Tragedy’ is clear from the comedic nature of not only its dialogue,
but also its form. According to contemporary dramatic theory, comedy
had turbulent beginnings and bourgeois protagonists and was derived
⁸¹ Davidson, Early Art of Coventry, 63–8.

⁸² There is evidence that at least one of Shakespeare’s contemporaries recognized the
connection between Juliet’s tomb and Christ’s sepulchre. The Second Maiden’s Tragedy
(1611), probably by Thomas Middleton, is strongly indebted to Romeo and Juliet and
has also been called by one recent editor ‘an allegory of Christ’s redemption of his
Church’. The tomb of the Lady is broken open in a scene which recalls both the breaking
open of Christ’s tomb in the mystery plays and Romeo and Juliet: The Second Maiden’s
Tragedy, ed. Anne Lancashire (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1978), 30,
40–4, 4. 3. 74–5, 4. 4. 40–3.
⁸³ The embrace of lovers in a tomb was a symbol of alchemical resurrection: Lyndy
Abraham, ‘ ‘‘The Lovers in the Tomb’’: Alchemical Emblems in Shakespeare, Donne
and Marvell’, Emblematica 5/2 (1991): 301–11.
from fiction, whereas tragedy was a true history of the high-born,
whose peaceful opening belied its tragic conclusion.⁸⁴ Contemporary
expectation, not simply dramatic theory, also suggested that Romeo and
Juliet, centred on young romantic love, would be a comedy. Susan
Snyder has shown that every comedy performed on the popular stage
in the early 1590s included a love story, and in most the courtship of
the young lovers was the mainspring of the plot, as it is in Romeo and
Juliet.⁸⁵ She has argued that: ‘Romeo and Juliet, young and in love and
defiant of obstacles, are attuned to the basic movement of the comic
game toward marriage and social regeneration. But they do not win: the
game turns into a sacrifice.’⁸⁶ But there is a story in which sacrifice itself
is part of the comic matrix, and through the Easter allusions Shakespeare
maintains the viability of a happy ending.
Flippant humour, as well as the comedic form of the paschal theme,
is also a much larger component of Q2. The hen-pecked husbands
of the opening scene are only present in the second quarto, in which
Capulet’s wife enters mockingly suggesting that her husband needs a
crutch rather than a sword, and Montague’s wife is apparently successful
in her fiat that her husband is forbidden to enter the fray (A4r 12–19).
The Nurse is funnier throughout—her anecdotes more garrulous, her
bawdy coarser, and her tardiness more drawn out.⁸⁷ Q2 also extends
the Nurse’s lament over Juliet’s dead body so that the scene’s latent
instability of tone becomes more obviously comic. The repetitious form
of her wail—‘O wo, O wofull, wofull, wofull day | … O day, O day,
O day, O hatefull day’ (K2v 22, 25)—is mirrored in the open comedy
of Pyramus’s lines in A Midsummer Night’s Dream: ‘O night, O night,
alack, alack, alack’ (5. 1. 170). The servants who are so essential to
comedy are rendered more prominent in Q2 not only through the
increased role of the Nurse, but also through the additional scene before
the Capulet feast showing the serving men have their own amorous
desires (towards Susan Grindstone and Nell) which they hope to fulfil
that evening (C2v 27–C3r 5), and the extended exchange between Will
Kempe and the minstrels after Juliet drinks the potion (K3v 1–K4r 3).
There also seems to be some attempt in Q2 to have Peter, the servant
⁸⁴ Herrick, Comic Theory, 59.

⁸⁵ H. B. Charlton, ‘Romeo and Juliet as Experimental Tragedy’, Proceedings of the
British Academy 25 (1939): 143–85; Harry Levin, ‘Form and Formality in Romeo and
Juliet’, Shakespeare Quarterly 11 (1960): 6; Snyder, Comic Matrix, 19.
⁸⁶ Snyder, Comic Matrix, 58.
⁸⁷ See e.g. B4v 8–13, Cr 14, E4v 6–18, Fr 35–Fv 3.
played by Will Kempe, accompany Romeo as he approaches Juliet’s
tomb, and hence to retain his comic presence right up to the last
moment.⁸⁸
The Friar, who unites the lovers and enables the reconciliation
of the two families, is central to the comic matrix of the play. His
canniness—shown through the creation of the love potion—is a
specifically comedic attribute, and his hopes for the stratagem are
expressed through wordplay in Q2. In Q1 the Friar describes how the
potion ‘coapst with death it selfe to fly from blame’ (H3r 18). In Q2
the comedic resurrection is made present through the language: ‘That
coapst with death, himselfe to scape from it’ (I3r 27)—the phoenix
‘scape’ rises out of the ashes of ‘coapst’.
The comedic form of the tragedy is also more pronounced in Q2.
The increased paschal motif is strengthened by other moments which
suggest the promise of a happy ending. In both texts Romeo is not
condemned to death for his killing of Tybalt, but only exiled, thereby
enabling the future reunion of the lovers. Snyder has suggested that the
overturn of a law in favour of a protagonist is so ubiquitous in early
Shakespearean comedy (essential to The Comedy of Errors, A Midsummer
Night’s Dream, Two Gentlemen of Verona and, to some extent, Love’s
Labour’s Lost) that it may be considered Shakespeare’s contribution to
the conventions of early 1590s comedy.⁸⁹ Both texts note that ‘the kind
Prince | Taking thy part, hath rushed aside the law’ (3. 3. 27) but the
point is stressed further in Q2 which contains the lines (absent in Q1,
although embedded in a section of text which is otherwise very close):
‘The law that threatned death becomes thy friend, | And turnes it to
exile, there art thou happie’ (Hv 13–14). Likewise the chorus at the
beginning of Act 2, only present in Q2, stresses the comedic ideas of the
elasticity of time and love’s ability to surmount obstacles: ‘But passion
lends them power, time meanes to meete’ (Dr 20). At the opposite end
of the play, Romeo’s soliloquy over his propitious dream at the start of
Act 5, essential to the hope of a comedic resolution, is cast in a more
hopeful form in Q2.⁹⁰ Such subtle strengthening of hopefulness in Q2
is also present in one of the most famous differences between the first
quartos. In Q1, the ‘grey-eyed morne’ speech is given to the Friar at the
⁸⁸ The stage direction ‘Enter Romeo and Peter’ and the speech headings (L2r 8, 27,
30) designate Romeo’s companion as Peter rather than Balthasar.
⁸⁹ Snyder, Comic Matrix, 25–6. This comic evasion finds its tragic analogue when
Romeo is able to circumvent the law against procuring poison.
⁹⁰ Compare Q1 I3r 15–23 with Q2 K4r 6–16.
beginning of Act 2 Scene 2. It is the opening of a new scene, and hence
the natural place for a speech in praise of the morning. However, in Q2
the speech appears to have been transferred to Romeo.⁹¹ The aubade
is now spoken at the conclusion of the balcony scene, a brilliant stroke
which imbues the lovers’ exchange with promise and ends the balcony
scene on an auspicious note.⁹²
The ambiguous optimism of Q2 conversely sets up the audience
for a greater tragic fall. Early critics who recognized the comic side of
Romeo and Juliet tended to feel that Shakespeare’s early experiments
in mixed genre were mistaken; one wrote that ‘there is altogether far
more of the trivial, and the frivolous than any tragedy can hope to
carry’.⁹³ By contrast this chapter has argued that Shakespeare combines
bawdy language and stock comic characters—the garrulous nurse,
illiterate servant, and old pantaloon—with more fundamental comic
themes, in particular the Easter resonance, to create a tragedy in which
light-heartedness is integral to the tragic effect. The promise of Juliet’s
resurrection and the lovers’ reunion creates the heart-wrenching turn
into tragedy. The religious allusions which are present in both the verbal
and visual texture of the play increase the tragic shock of its catastrophe.
⁹¹ The speech is presumably only also still spoken by the Friar because the reviser
forgot to delete it from its old position (or marked up the deletion insufficiently):
Ioppolo, Revising Shakespeare, 90.
⁹² The use of dawn to give hope at the end of a night-time scene is a strategy
Shakespeare was to use again in the Duke’s ‘unfolding star’ speech in Measure for Measure
(4. 2. 202–9).
⁹³ J. M. Nosworthy, ‘The Two Angry Families of Verona’, Shakespeare Quarterly 3/3
(1952): 226.
4
‘I am not he shall buyld the Lord a
house’: Religious Imagery and the
Succession to the English Throne in
King John
As has been seen in the previous chapter, religious imagery could be used
by Shakespeare in an uncomplicated way as part of a positive presentation
of a protagonist. The aura of divinity which surrounds Juliet is part of
her portrayal as a deeply attractive, sacrificial character. This chapter will
consider another early play, King John, in which a young protagonist
is also rendered in a sympathetic light through language and staging
which connect him with the archetypal suffering victim, Christ. Arthur,
however, unlike Juliet, is royal and this chapter will also consider the deep
connection between royalty and divinity which existed in early-modern
England. The way in which Shakespeare interrogates this association
is fundamental to his portrayal of kingship. In King John Shakespeare
skews the usually complacent equation of royal dominance with divine
approval, by transferring the locus of holiness away from the seat of
power—the English throne—and conferring it on a dispossessed child.
King John is interesting in this regard as he had become a paradigmatic
monarch in Tudor discourse. Through the work of early-modern Prot-
estant playwrights and historiographers, John had been rescued from
his medieval portrayal as an ineffective and unsympathetic king, and
converted into a monarch who embodied the religio-political doctrines
at the heart of official Tudor policy. In order to effect this transform-
ation and reclaim John as a heroic ruler who had defended England’s
sovereignty, Protestant writers used religious imagery to surround John
with an aura of divinity. The rhetoric which connected King John with
Christ (or Christological types such as David) strengthened his position
as a Christian king.
90 Religious Imagery and the Succession
This chapter will first consider the ubiquitous connection between
royalty and divinity, and then look at its specific uses in Shakespeare’s
main source: the anonymous Troublesome Raigne of King John (1591).¹
As this chapter will show The Troublesome Raigne not only shares its
messianic tone with earlier Protestant histories of the king, such as Bale’s
King Johan and Foxe’s martyrology, but also introduces analogues with
the mystery cycles which deepen this aspect of the play. The chapter
will then explore the way in which Shakespeare systematically transfers
the signifiers of divinely sanctioned rule (which he found in his sources)
from John to Arthur. It will argue that these religious markers crystallize
in the blinding of Arthur, a scene in which Shakespeare heightens the
audience’s horror and pity by creating resonances with the sacrifice
of Isaac and its typological fulfilment, the Passion. Shakespeare has
transferred the politically legitimating biblical echoes from John onto
Arthur.
The consensus of recent criticism is that Shakespeare’s alteration in
the portrayal of John is symptomatic of his eschewing the religious
framework of his sources. This chapter, however, will take issue with
the assumption that the highly political atmosphere of King John
is evacuated of religiously sanctioned ethical meaning. King John is
indeed no longer surrounded by an aura of holiness, but this is not
because majesty has lost its sanctity, but because John has lost his
majesty. Shakespeare has transferred the crypto-religious power with
which John had been imbued by Protestant writers, onto his nephew,
Arthur. Just as Foxe and Bale had made John more kingly by connecting
him with Christ, so Shakespeare’s divergence from his sources in
making Arthur, rather than John, the locus for holiness in the play has
political ramifications. The religious resonances explored in this chapter
are not a denial of the deeply political nature of Shakespeare’s play,
but a recognition of the fact that in a society in which divinity and
royalty were so closely linked, such allusions support Arthur’s claim to
be the true king. Purely political readings of King John often ignore
Arthur because he is disenfranchised, but Shakespeare has reworked the
¹ For the evidence that The Troublesome Raigne is Shakespeare’s source, see Beatrice
Groves, ‘Memory, Composition, and the Relationship of King John to the Troublesome
Raigne of King John’, Comparative Drama 38/3 (2004): 277–90. As discussed in this
article, I find the traditional explanation that Troublesome Raigne is Shakespeare’s
source far more compelling than more recent suggestions of King John’s priority, and
shall therefore assume throughout this chapter that Shakespeare is indebted to The
Troublesome Raigne, rather than vice versa.
Religious Imagery and the Succession 91
institutional complacency of divine-right thinking. His identification
of holy kingship with an innocent and vulnerable boy reinvigorates
the Gospel inversion in which true royalty is found in the powerless.
The relocation of religious imagery from the king to the child has a
subversive political edge.
In Elizabethan panegyric majesty was frequently coupled with divin-
ity, and as David Norbrook has argued, in the early-modern period ‘the
monarchy retained a semi-mystical aura, something less than magic,
but still something a little more than metaphor’.² Elizabeth indulged
the cult of the virgin queen which grew up around her and allowed, if
not encouraged, the appropriation of Marian imagery which it entailed.
Helen Hackett’s excellent work has conclusively shown that correspond-
ences were created between the Virgin mother and the maiden queen,
and has argued persuasively for pragmatic rather than psychological
explanations for the phenomenon.³ A less studied, but perhaps more
striking aspect of Elizabethan panegyric, is its appropriation of divine
imagery. As well as being praised as the new Virgin, Elizabeth was
also compared to Christ. Hackett’s argument that figuring Elizabeth as
the Virgin simultaneously praises and contains her power is persuasive,
and perhaps some critics have been more ready to see the feminine,
Marian side of Elizabethan panegyric than the Christological images
which invest Elizabeth with absolute power and authority.⁴ There are
numerous examples in which Elizabeth was figured as Christ by hopeful
Protestants early in her reign, such as the historiated initial ‘C’ of Foxe’s
Actes and Monumentes (1563) which showed Elizabeth receiving the
² David Norbrook, ‘Panegyric of the Monarch and Its Social Context under Elizabeth
I and James I’ (Ph.D. diss., University of Oxford, 1978), 18. See also Debora Kuller
Shuger, Political Theologies in Shakespeare’s England: The Sacred and the State in Measure
for Measure (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 54–61.
³ Elkin Calhoun Wilson, England’s Eliza (London: Frank Cass, 1966); Frances A.
Yates, Astraea: The Imperial Theme in the Sixteenth Century (London: Routledge & Kegan
Paul, 1975); Roy Strong, The Cult of Elizabeth: Elizabethan Portraiture and Pageantry
(Wallop, Hants: Thames & Hudson, 1977); Peter McClure and Robin Headlam Wells,
‘Elizabeth I as a second Virgin Mary’, Renaissance Studies 4/1 (1990): 38–70; Hackett,
Virgin Mother, 128–30, 139–44, 162, and passim.
⁴ See e.g. example Elizabeth’s position as the flower on secular Jesse trees which
figures her as Christ, or at least Christ and Mary, rather than simply Mary, as it is usually
explained: Robin Headlam Wells, Spenser’s Fairie Queene and the Cult of Elizabeth
(London: Croom Helm, 1983), 16; Émile Mâle, The Gothic Image: Religious Art in
France of the Thirteenth Century, trans. Dora Nussey (London: Harper & Row, 1958),
165. See also John N. King, Tudor Royal Iconography: Literature and Art in an Age of
Religious Crisis (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 200; Edmund Spenser,
The Faerie Queene, ed. A. C. Hamilton (London: Longman, 2001), III. iii. 22, III. iv. 3.
homage of three kneeling, bearded men, the new ruler in a secular
Nativity scene.⁵ Throughout her reign Elizabeth also made extensive
use of the twinned Christological birds, the phoenix and the pelican.
She was frequently praised as a new Moses, and also as the ‘day star’,
Christ, whom Moses prefigures.⁶
Elizabeth’s death saw the publication of a collection of poems entitled
Sorrowes Ioy (1603), which lamented her passing and welcomed the
new king. Many of these poems figured her as Christ, and others
used her appropriation of Marian imagery to glorify the king as a
type of the Christ-child.⁷ A striking example occurs in ‘On the Day
of our Queene’s Death, and Our king’s Proclamation’, which exploits
the felicitous happenstance that the queen died on the eve of the
Annunciation. The poet takes the coincidence in dates to its logical
extreme, and as the ‘Lady’ of the poem oscillates between Elizabeth
and the Virgin Mary, James and Christ coalesce as the ‘Lord’ who is
foretold.⁸
Rulers did not always leave such relationships between the political
and ecclesiastical year to chance. King John was crowned on Ascension
Day, 1199, and presumably tolerated the administrative inconvenience
of dating the regnal year to a movable feast because the coronation date
hedged him round with a protective aura of divinity.⁹ The historical
John, according to J. C. Holt, needed to secure his right against
Arthur’s competing claim, and therefore chose his coronation day to
confer legitimating holiness upon himself, by sharing the date of his
accession with the day that Christ took up his kingship in heaven. The
poets of the Jacobean era, like the politicians of the twelfth century,
exploit the conjunction of the ecclesiastical and regnal year, because
for both there is an innate connection between the Christian faith and
the king.
⁵ Hackett, Virgin Mother, 5, 80.

⁶ Francis Sabie, Pan’s Pipe (1595), ed. James Wilson Bright and Wilfred Pirt Mustard
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1910), ll. 197–208; John Nichols, The Progresses
and Public Processions of Queen Elizabeth (London, 1788–1805), i: ix; A. Nixon, Elizaes
Memoriall (London, 1603), B3v ; Henry Chettle, Englandes Mourning Garment […]
(London, 1603), Fr . For the phoenix imagery see below, ch. 6.
⁷ See John Watkins, ‘ ‘‘Out of her Ashes May a Second Phoenix Rise’’: James I and
the Legacy of Elizabethan Anti-Catholicism’, in Arthur P. Marotti, ed., Catholicism and
Anti-Catholicism in Early Modern English Texts (London: Macmillan, 1999), 116–36.
⁸ John Nichols, The Progresses, Processions, and Magnificent Festivities of King James
the First, His Royal Consort, Family and Court (London, 1828), i. 10.
⁹ J. C. Holt, ‘King John and Arthur of Brittany’, Nottingham Medieval Studies 44
(2000): 82–103.
Traditional modes of fostering connections between royalty and
religion gained strength in England after the Reformation from the need
to assert the English monarch’s divine right to rule both church and
state. Divine-right monarchy became a nationalist agenda, constructing
a God-given right for England to rule herself without the intervention
of the pope. The more divine the monarch appeared, the more obvious
was his or her right to govern in God’s stead.¹⁰ In 1198, just as John
was about to ascend the English throne, Innocent III wrote: ‘The moon
derives her light from the sun and is in truth inferior to the sun in both
size and quality, in position as well as effect. In the same way the royal
power derives its dignity from the pontifical authority.’¹¹ This was not a
position which was tenable in Elizabethan England. In The Troublesome
Raigne of King John the king defies the papal legate, and through him
Innocent III’s pronouncement, by setting up his divinely appointed
kingship in opposition to the Pope’s claims:
Know sir Priest as I honour the Church and holy Churchmen, so I scorne
to be subject to the greatest Prelate in the world. Tell thy Maister so from
me, and say, John of England said it, that never an Italian Priest of them
all, shall either have tythe, tole, or poling penie out of England, but as I am
King, so will I raigne next under God, supreame head both over spirituall and
temprall.¹²
The author of The Troublesome Raigne introduces John in the preface as
‘a warlike Christian and your Countreyman’ and divine-right thinking
is enthusiastically championed as a nationalist agenda in the play. In
common with other post-Reformation writers, the playwright constructs
John’s disobedience as a challenge to papal power which prefigures
England’s break with Rome.
The first chroniclers of John’s reign—Roger of Wendover, Matthew
Paris, and Ralph of Coggeshall—all portrayed John as a weak king. It
was William Tyndale who first suggested that John’s defiance of the
pope could be read as a sign of strength rather than corruption, an
interpretation seconded by the Protestant polemicists John Bale and
¹⁰ James I’s accession has been taken by some historians as the beginning of divine-
right thinking in England, but in fact it was gaining impetus during Elizabeth’s reign:
J. P. Sommerville, ‘Richard Hooker, Hadrian Saravia, and the Advent of the Divine
Right of Kings’, History of Political Thought 4/2 (1983): 231.
¹¹ Henry Bettenson, ed., Documents of the Christian Church (Oxford: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 1943), 156.
¹² The Troublesome Raigne of John, King of England, ed. J. W. Sider (New York:
Garland, 1979), 3. 74–81. All subsequent references are to this edition.
John Foxe.¹³ Other historians, such as Richard Grafton and Raphael
Holinshed, accepted this sympathetic portrait of John, and gradually a
new orthodoxy of John as a proto-Protestant martyr who had defied
the pope, defended England’s sovereignty, and been murdered by a
monk replaced the old image of an ineffective and grasping king. In
order to support this new interpretation Bale, Foxe, and the author of
The Troublesome Raigne surround him with an aura of sanctity which
strengthens his position as a heroic figure. This holiness is projected
forward onto the real architect of the Reformation, Henry VIII, and
binds the English crown to the divine source of its power.
One of the biblical tropes which illustrates the evolution of John’s
status is that of King David: a cherished leader of the nation of Israel
whose private life could yet make him an ambivalent figure.¹⁴ In one
of the early chronicle sources, Matthew Paris’s Chronica Majora (first
published by Archbishop Parker in 1571) the Archbishop of Canterbury
delivers a speech at John’s coronation which compares the new king to
David. The Archbishop declares that John is following the precedent of
Saul and David in being chosen by election rather than by strict descent.
The reference to such Old Testament patriarchs who have likewise been
chosen by the Holy Spirit rather than by the laws of succession gives a
biblical precedent to John’s practice which could be read as flattering to
the king, but it also draws attention to his dubious claim to the throne.
Historically it seems that the Archbishop favoured Arthur’s claim and
only reluctantly submitted to John’s coronation. In this context the
ostensible compliment of the Davidic reference veils a deep criticism:
‘Archbishop Hubert was afterwards asked why he acted in this manner,
to which he replied that he knew John would one day or other bring
the kingdom into great confusion, wherefore he determined that he
should owe his elevation to election and not hereditary right.’¹⁵ Paris’s
¹³ William Tyndale, The Obedience of Christian Man, in Doctrinal Treatises and

Introductions to Different Portions of Holy Scripture, ed. Henry Walter (Cambridge:
Parker Society, 1847), 338.
¹⁴ See e.g. the undercurrents in Wyatt’s translation of the penitential Psalms: Stephen
Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1980), 121. For the inverse, positive, and Christological significance of
David in this period, see David Evett, ‘Types of King David in Shakespeare’s Lancastrian
Tetralogy’, Shakespeare Studies 14 (1981): 139–42.
¹⁵ This is one of Paris’s additions to the earlier chronicle: Roger of Wendover’s Flowers
of History, trans. J. A. Giles (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1849), ii. 181. For the evidence
that the Archbishop opposed John’s succession see W. L. Warren, King John (London:
Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1964), 49.
ambiguous use of the patriarch, however, is simplified by Bale. The
Protestant writer compares John to David merely to indicate the extent
to which the king enjoys God’s favour: ‘As a stronge Dauid at the voyce
of verytie, | great Golye, the pope, he strake downe with hys slynge.’¹⁶
In Bale the analogue has lost its equivocation and John is likened to
David because both are holy kings and national heroes.
The author of The Troublesome Raigne combines these approaches
and the Davidic analogue recognises the personal failings of both kings,
but also strengthens John’s position as a holy, nationalistic ruler. John
dies with the words:
But in the spirit I cry unto my God,
As did the Kingly Prophet David cry,
(Whose hands, as mine, with murder were attaint)
I am not he shall buyld the Lord a house,
Or roote these Locusts from the face of earth:
But if my dying heart deceave me not,
From out these loynes shall spring a Kingly braunch
Whose armes shall reach unto the gates of Rome,
And with his feete treade downe the Strumpets pride,
That sits upon the chaire of Babylon.
(15.98–107)
John’s affirmation through negation—‘I am not he shall buyld the
Lord a house’—foretells a future monarch who will redeem the nation’s
relationship with God. In The Troublesome Raigne the connection
between John and David, suggested by Paris and reworked by Bale,
reaches its zenith. John speaks David’s words about being denied the
right to build the temple because of his sin:
And Dauid sayde to Salomon, My sonne, I purposed with my selfe to build an
house to the Name of the Lord my God, But the word of the Lord came to me,
saying, Thou hast shedde muche blood, and hast made great battels: thou shalt
not builde an house unto my Name … Beholde, a sonne is borne to thee … He
shal build an house for my Name. (1 Chr. 22: 7–9)
The author of The Troublesome Raigne figures John as a holy king in
this Davidic allusion, but the flawed side of David’s character also finds
¹⁶ John Bale, King Johan, ed. Barry B. Adams (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington
Library, 1969), ll. 1114–18, 1651–3. See also John Elson, ‘Studies in King John
Plays’, in Giles E. Dawson, Edwin E. Willoughby, and James G. McManaway, eds.,
Joseph Quincy Adams: Memorial Studies (Washington: Folger Shakespeare Library, 1948),
192–3.
an analogue in John’s sin. This writer uses the complexity inherent
in the Davidic image to reconcile Protestant polemic with John’s
problematic character. The contemporary relevance of the reference is
clear: emancipation from Rome must be begun by John’s descendant,
Henry VIII, just as it was Solomon—David’s descendant—who built
the Temple.
The connection with David and Solomon opens up the Christological
significance of John’s words through their association with the Jesse
tree. This dying speech—in which John prophesies that ‘from out these
loynes shall spring a Kingly braunch’—is the apogee of the arboreal
imagery that has been used throughout The Troublesome Raigne to
indicate royal blood. The bastard is greeted as a ‘brave braunch of kingly
stock, | A right Plantaginet’ (11. 30) and John says that by killing Arthur
‘we have proynd the more than needfull braunch | That did oppresse
the true wel-growing stock’ (8. 28). As Scott McMillin and Sally-Beth
MacLean have recently argued, this royal family tree is a celebration of
Elizabeth’s lineage in which John dies ‘placing himself on the tree of
Jesse and predicting a major outbranching called Henry VIII’.¹⁷ The
tree of Jesse was a pictorial representation of the royal section of Christ’s
family tree which, by illustrating his right to the throne of Israel, proved
his kingliness. The Jesse-tree established Christ as the fountainhead of
all secular monarchies.¹⁸ John’s speech combines Jesse-tree imagery with
the prophecy of a holy future king: a union which was fundamental
to the mystery plays known as the Ordo Prophetarum or Prophets’ plays
which form a transition between the Old and New Testament sections
of the cycle, as prophets from both parts of the Bible foretell the coming
of Christ.¹⁹ The Prophets’ plays may not be a direct source for the author
of The Troublesome Raigne, but they are an illuminating analogue drawn
from a relatively close theatrical tradition.²⁰
¹⁷ McMillin and MacLean, The Queen’s Men, 157–8.

¹⁸ Matthew 1: 6–16. See John K. Bonnel, ‘The Source in Art of the So-called Prophets
Play in the Hegge Collection’, Publications of the Modern Language Association of America
29 (1914): 328, 335–7.
¹⁹ See Bale’s Protestant version of this play, God’s Promises, in Complete Plays of John
Bale, ii. 643–56, 771–7.
²⁰ In both the Chester and the York cycles there is evidence that these plays are
sixteenth-century additions. Only one, strikingly late, manuscript of the Chester cycle
(MS.H, which was transcribed in 1607) contains the procession of prophets: The Chester
Plays, ed. Hermann Deimling,  62 and 115 (London: Early English Text Society,
1892), 5. 281–432; Robert A. Brawer, ‘The Form and Function of the Prophetic
Procession in the Middle English Cycle Play’, Annuale Mediaevale 13 (1972): 111. It
John’s prophecy in The Troublesome Raigne shares with the Prophets’
plays its emphasis on the royalty of the child who is about to be born.²¹
All four extant cycles stress the Messiah’s role as King of Kings, and
this is something which is dwelt on in the Ordo Prophetorum. In the
Towneley play David proclaims that: ‘he shall be lord and kyng of
all | Tyll [at] hys feete shall kyngis fall’ (7. 127–8). The York play states
that he will be born from Jesse’s royal line: ‘a wande sall brede of Jesse
boure’ (12. 76). This prophecy, which incorporates Jesse tree imagery
into the Prophets’ play, is most distinct in the N-town cycle in which
the play is called the Jesse radix. Jesse-tree imagery and prophecy are
likewise combined in The Troublesome Raigne. In the N-town play Jesse
says that ‘a blyssd braunch xal sprynge of me’ (7. 19), just as John says
‘from out these loynes shall spring a Kingly braunch’ (15. 104). David
says that his descendant shall ‘ageyns the deuellys fals illusyon | With
regall power to make man fre’ (7. 31–2). John likewise prophesies that
his royal descendant will defeat the illusory power of the pope, which is
nothing more than a ‘Strumpets pride’ (15. 106).
In Foxe, Augustine’s scheme of the apocalyptic struggle between two
cities, Jerusalem and Babylon, is recast as the struggle between the Prot-
estant and Catholic churches, and Babylon comes to represent Rome.²²
John’s final speech in The Troublesome Raigne prophesying the downfall
of Rome is cast in the same mould of Protestant historiography. A king
will come:
Whose armes shall reach unto the gates of Rome,
And with his feete treade downe the Strumpets pride,
That sits upon the chaire of Babylon.
(15.105–7)
In the Ordo Prophetarum this king was Christ and he will destroy the
Antichrist and usher in a new reign of gold, but here the language of
Revelation is recast and the New Jerusalem will be governed by Henry
also appears to have been a sixteenth-century addition to the York cycle, see Johnston
and Rogerson, York, i. 18, 704; York Plays, 423–4; Peter Meredith, ‘John Clerke’s Hand
in the York Register’, Leeds Studies in English 12 (1981): 254, 259.
²¹ Thomas P. Campbell, ‘The Prophets’ Pageant in the English Mystery Cycle: Its
Origin and Function’, Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama 17 (1974): 110.
²² See Richard Bauckham, Tudor Apocalypse: Sixteenth Century Apocalypticism, Millen-
narianism and the English Reformation from John Bale to John Foxe and Thomas Brightman
(Oxford: Sutton Courtenay, 1978), 56, 80; Isabel Rivers, Classical and Christian Ideas in
English Renaissance Poetry, 2nd edn. (London: Routledge, 1994), 57.
VIII. John’s speech is likewise connected with prophecies of Christ in the
Ordo Prophetarum through his resonant ‘I am not he’ which recalls John
the Baptist: the prophet into which the Ordo Prophetarum condenses all
the New Testament witnesses to Christ.²³ King John’s prophecy of the
greater one who will come after him is reminiscent of John the Baptist’s
promise, ‘but one mightier than I cometh’ (Luke 3: 16).²⁴
King John’s speech brings together many of the aspects of the
Prophet’s plays: references to the Jesse tree, Old Testament messianic
prophecies, Revelation’s promise of the Second Coming, and John
the Baptist’s foretelling of the coming of Christ. All are used in an
earthly context—one king predicting the birth of a future king who
will succeed in bringing Protestantism to England—but the scriptural
references endow the English throne, under John and under his future
successor Henry VIII, with a quasi-divinity. In the mystery cycles the
audience knew that the prophecies had been fulfilled, and the procession
of the prophets usually directly preceded or even (in the case of the
Coventry cycle) became part of the Nativity play. The author of The
Troublesome Raigne has used the same dramatic technique and John’s
predictions have a frisson of excitement to them because the audience
knows that his prophecies, too, have come to pass.
Throughout the Protestant refashioning of John’s history the messian-
ic resonances have crystallized at John’s death. In Actes and Monuments
Foxe puts the words of Caiaphas into his murderer’s mouth: ‘The
foresayde monke Simon … did cast in hys wicked heart, howe he most
speedely might bring him to his ende. Hee alledged for himselfe the
Prophecie of Cayphas, John II. saying It is better that one man die,
then all the people should perish.’²⁵ The Christic resonance of John’s
death, however, began with the chronicles of the late fifteenth and early
sixteenth centuries. In these histories John was no longer poisoned with
a mug of ale, but shared a cup of wine with his murderer. The story
had assumed its basic shape and this essential form was eucharistic:
‘The modifications wrought on the story brought together bread, wine,
²³ Brawer, ‘Form and Function’, 89.

²⁴ This resonance has also been recognized by Carole Levin; see Propaganda in the
English Reformation: Heroic and Villainous Images of King John (Lewiston, NY: Edwin
Mellen, 1988), 200–1; ‘The Historical Evolution of the Death of King John in Three
Renaissance Plays’, Journal of the Rocky Mountain Medieval and Renaissance Association 3
(1982): 98.
²⁵ Foxe, Actes and Monuments, i. 256. See also Richard Grafton, A Chronicle at large
and meere History of the affayres of Englande […] (London, 1569), ii. K5v .
a table; a betrayal is revealed, a sacrifice made.’²⁶ This interpretation
seems to have evolved from crypto-Christian stories in earlier chronicles,
such as in the fourteenth-century Short English Metrical Chronicle, in
which the monk decides to murder John because of his vow to feed all
England with a loaf of bread and a shoulder of meat—a cruel inversion
of Christ’s feeding of the five thousand.²⁷
John’s poisoner is explicitly linked with Judas in Bale’s King Johan.
As John realizes that he has been poisoned, England tells him: ‘a false
Iudas kysse he hath gyven you’ (l. 2144). The connection between the
monk and Judas was widespread and tended to focus on the manner
of the monk’s death. James Morey has shown how intestinal swelling
was common to all versions of John’s death (the original explanation
of his death being dysentery from overindulging in unripe fruit or new
cider). It seems possible that some wish to preserve the king from this
ugly and ignominious end may have been instrumental in the creation
of a poisoner, so that the symptoms could be consigned to him. The
murderer shares the poisoned food in order to allay John’s suspicion
and the swollen belly is transferred. Once it is the betrayer and not the
king who suffers this fate, the Judas parallels start to become apparent.
According to Acts, Judas ‘burst a sunder in the middes, & all his bowels
gushed out’.²⁸ In Foxe the monk dies with ‘his guts gushing out of his
belly’ and deaths of king and poisoner are illustrated with a full-page
woodcut.²⁹ In the first edition the legend to the picture of the monk
runs, ‘the Monk dead of the poyson he drank to the king’ (1563 edition,
i. 150–1). The caption is changed in the second, and all subsequent
editions, into: ‘the monke lyeth here burst of the poyson that he dranke
to the king’ (1583 edition, i. 256–7). The vivid combination of ‘burst’
in the woodcut and ‘gushing’ in the main text to describe the monk’s
death in the 1583 edition make the allusion to the account in Acts even
closer: ‘he burst a sunder in the middes, & all his bowels gushed out’.
In the woodcut Foxe explicitly links John’s murder with an inverted
eucharist. The picture montage connects the sacrilegious mass being
said for the monk’s soul with the inverted eucharist in which the monk
²⁶ Levin, ‘The Historical Evolution’, 87.

²⁷ An Anonymous Short English Metrical Chronicle, ed. Ewald Zettl,  196 (London:
Early English Text Society, 1935), ll. 969–82.
²⁸ Acts 1: 18 (Bishops’ version). For depictions of this death, see Gertrude Schiller,
Iconography of Christian Art, trans. Janet Seligman (London: Lund Humphries, 1972),
ii. figs. 278, 280.
²⁹ Foxe, Actes and Monuments, i. 256.
proffers the king a chalice of poisoned wine. The eucharistic imagery
at John’s death, like the association between his murderer and Judas,
figures his betrayal by his Catholic subjects as a Last Supper. As with The
Troublesome Raigne, John’s death in Foxe clarifies and strengthens the
quasi-Christic resonance and anti-Catholic polemic of the Protestant
re-creation of John’s reign.
The crypto-religious quality of John in The Troublesome Raigne, and
the frankly Christlike aspects of his death in Foxe and Bale, has led
some commentators to see John as sharing this holy characterization
in King John. Shakespeare’s account of the monk’s death retains the
allusion to his ruptured stomach: ‘a monk, I tell you, a resolvèd
villain, | Whose bowels suddenly burst out’ (5. 6. 30–1). The Judas
parallel is recognized by James Morey, who concludes: ‘Shakespeare
intended—and achieved—a consistent parallel in King John: the traitor
is Judas, the king is Christ.’³⁰ However, in The Troublesome Raigne,
as in Foxe, anti-Catholic polemic is the raison d’être for creating
the character of John, and essential to his Christlike portrayal. The
Christian echoes in John’s poisoning in Foxe, as in his final speech in The
Troublesome Raigne, are central to his reincarnation as a proto-Protestant
martyr. Shakespeare’s play, however, softens the anti-Catholic rhetoric
of its sources.³¹ When Shakespeare turns away from the anti-Catholic
polemic of his sources, John’s character suffers an inevitable diminution.
Shakespeare eschews both the centrality of John’s poisoning and its
eucharistic resonance. Shakespeare retains the monk’s Judas-like death
from Foxe, but by choosing not to stage the poisoning scene inspired by
the Last Supper he removes the context which illuminates the allusion.
John Barton, influenced by his reading of Bale and The Troublesome
Raigne, directed a production of King John in 1974 and portrayed
Shakespeare’s John as the Christlike sacrificial king whom he had found
³⁰ James H. Morey, ‘The Death of King John in Shakespeare and Bale’, Shakespeare
Quarterly 45/3 (1994): 331. It is true that in The Troublesome Raigne it is only the
king who is described as dying in this way—‘his bowells are devided in themselves’
(15. 112)—and Shakespeare by transferring this fate onto the monk might seem to have
created a Judas-allusion out of it. However, Shakespeare is probably simply borrowing
straight from Foxe rather than The Troublesome Raigne at this point.
³¹ See e.g. Edward Rose, ‘Shakespeare as an Adapter’, in The Troublesome Raigne of
John, King of England (London: C. Praetorius, 1888), i. pp. viii, xi; David Bevington,
Tudor Drama and Politics: A Critical Approach to Topical Meaning (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1968), 197–8; Lukas Erne, ‘ ‘‘Popish Tricks’’ and ‘‘a Ruinous
Monastery’’: Titus Andronicus and the Question of Shakespeare’s Catholicism’, in Lukas
Erne and Guillemette Bolens, eds., The Limits of Textuality (Tübingen: Gunter Narr,
2000), 142.
in the earlier drama. Barton wrote in the programme: ‘I turned to
The Troublesome Reign of King John (Shakespeare’s probable source play,
1591) and to the Tudor King Johan (1539)… it appeared that a marriage
of the two texts (King John and Troublesome Reign) might be fruitful.’³²
The poisoning scene was moved to Christmas day: a birthday which,
according to Barton’s script, John shared with Jesus. The scene, which is
not staged in Shakespeare’s play, was performed as ‘a winter enactment
of a kind of Last Supper, with John seated at a long table in the centre of
twelve cauled monks’.³³ Critics were unimpressed. Peter Thomson, who
recognized in the poisoning scene ‘a Christmas feast arranged according
to Leonardo’s ‘Last Supper’… with John as Christ’, saw the frequent
religious references as evidence that ‘Barton was listening to himself
rather than to the play’.³⁴ Barton’s production, however, is an exact
illustration of the argument of this chapter. The perceived failure of
Barton’s religious interpretation of King John does not prove that there is
no engagement with religion in the play, but that it is no longer the king
who is holy. The locus of holiness has been shifted by Shakespeare away
from the monarch, and Barton, by relying on Shakespeare’s sources,
unconsciously highlighted how greatly Shakespeare has departed from
them in their portrayal of John as a proto-Protestant martyr.
Throughout the latter half of the twentieth century, critics have been
reacting against those, who like John Barton and James Morey, find a
crypto-religious quality in Shakespeare’s John because they find it in
Shakespeare’s sources. The current consensus is that Shakespeare has
created a deeply cynical and political play, divested of the religious
nuances found in the earlier, overtly Protestant versions of the story.
Carole Levin, one of the best writers on King John’s relationship with
its sources, argues that:
By deliberately stripping away the Christian images that surround John’s death
in the earlier plays, Shakespeare … removes kingship from the religious context,
turning his play into a more political statement… Shakespeare is concerned
about kingship and the responsibilities of the ruler, but he does not place it
within the deeply religious context of either the medieval chronicles or Bale or
The Troublesome Raigne.³⁵
³² Quoted in Geraldine Cousin, King John, Shakespeare in Performance (Manchester:

Manchester University Press, 1994), 65.
³³ Ibid. 68, 71.
³⁴ Peter Thomson, ‘The Smallest Season: The Royal Shakespeare Company at
Stratford in 1974’, Shakespeare Survey 28 (1975): 141.
³⁵ Levin, Propaganda, 103, 210.
Other critics have likewise argued that in King John, ‘Shakespeare
reduces the importance of the religious issue to a minimum and does
not attribute any sacredness to the authority of the King as one anointed
by God.’³⁶ A political reading of the play, devoid of religious nuances,
is the dominant view of current scholarship, with critics arguing that
‘Shakespeare intends for us to learn from King John that things are better
in Europe before God enters politics in act 3.’³⁷ Such critics argue that
in this early history play Shakespeare envisages a political system empty
of any religiously sanctioned ethical meaning.
The rest of this chapter, however, will argue that Shakespeare has not
discarded the religious sentiment of his sources, only radically altered its
import. It is no longer John, the powerful proto-Protestant martyr who
carries the biblical nuances of the play, but Arthur, the helpless heir to
the throne. Kingship retains its aura of sanctity, but the usurped power
of John has no part in this sacredness. Having established the crypto-
religious quality surrounding John in Shakespeare’s sources, this chapter
will proceed to argue that Shakespeare’s portrayal of Arthur—his age,
character, prominence, and near-blinding in Act 4 Scene 1—makes him
into a sanctified figure who inherits the Christic resonance of John in the
earlier plays. The biblical allusions with which Protestant playwrights
and historiographers imbued John’s triumphs and death were part of
their political enterprise to create a proto-Protestant martyr out of a
monarch who had defied Rome. In King John Arthur’s holiness also has
political ramifications: it supports his title to the English throne and
by realigning Christian virtue with powerlessness forms a latent critique
of royal panegyric which connects the sacredness of monarchy with its
supremacy.
In both medieval and Protestant chronicles Arthur has only a minor
role to play (and he is entirely omitted by Bale). Arthur is captured
and dies in the first few years of John’s reign in the first few pages or
paragraphs of the chronicle accounts and his fate does not impinge upon
later more important events: John’s defiance of Rome, the revolt of his
barons, and the signing of Magna Carta. It has long been recognized,
³⁶ S. C. Sen Gupta, Shakespeare’s Historical Plays (Oxford: Oxford University Press,

1964), 103.
³⁷ Tim Spiekerman, Shakespeare’s Political Realism: The English History Plays (Albany:
State University of New York Press, 2001), 55. For further political and anti-religious
interpretations of the play see Paola Pugliatti, Shakespeare the Historian (London:
Macmillan, 1996), 82; Sigurd Burckhardt, Shakespearean Meaning (Princeton: Princeton
Unviersity Press, 1968), 116–43.
therefore, that The Troublesome Raigne and King John are unique in
placing Arthur at the centre of the plot and making his death the
cause of the secession of the barons.³⁸ The author of The Troublesome
Raigne is responsible for this skilful piece of plotting, but he does not
make Arthur as central as his innovation demands. The anonymous
playwright is cautious about his modification because it is incompatible
with his desire to place John at the heroic centre of his play. John is a far
more complex figure in The Troublesome Raigne than he is in any of the
other Protestant accounts, but he remains the locus for holiness around
which the biblical imagery and religious language revolve. Shakespeare
followed the storyline of The Troublesome Raigne closely, but he has
systematically increased the importance of Arthur throughout. The
earlier playwright refashioned the events of John’s reign around the
fate of Arthur, and created an unfolding story from the tangled skein
of the chronicle sources, but it was left to Shakespeare to refine and
rationalize this new structure. Unlike the author of The Troublesome
Raigne, Shakespeare recognized the paradigm shift that resulted from
his structural innovation, and developed Arthur’s role accordingly.
Arthur is central to King John in a far more fundamental way than
he is in The Troublesome Raigne. In almost every scene Shakespeare
expands Arthur’s importance or privileges his cause. In The Troublesome
Raigne, for example, Arthur’s death is not the sole cause of the nobles’
uprising. Essex twice cites the Pope’s excommunication of John—‘the
Popes most dreadfull cursse’ (11. 67) and ‘The holy charge that wee
receivde from Rome’ (9.89)—as a primary reason for the revolt. The
rebels are described as ‘a holy knot of Catholique consent’ (11. 200),
and their eagerness to obey the Pope in deposing their monarch would
have linked them, in the minds of the Elizabethan audience, with the
Catholic rebels who rose against Elizabeth after her excommunication
in 1570. Shakespeare has removed the Catholic taint imputed to the
uprising and has simplified its motivation so that the barons revolt not
because of the Pope’s order, or Chester’s banishment, but, ostensibly at
least, purely through outrage at John’s treatment of Arthur.
Shakespeare’s augmentation of the role of Arthur’s mother likewise
gives his cause more prominence. At the height of King John’s popularity
³⁸ The Pictorial Edition of the Works of Shakespere, ed. Charles Knight (London: Charles
Knight, 1838–43), i. 72. More recently it has been argued that Arthur’s centrality proves
the priority of King John, see Brian Boyd, ‘King John and The Troublesome Raigne:
Sources, Structure and Sequence’, Philological Quarterly 74/1 (1995): 37–56.
during the nineteenth century Constance was recognized as a powerful
stage presence and the passionate intensity of her orations ensure that
Arthur is not forgotten, even when he is absent from the stage.³⁹ In
Scene 3 of The Troublesome Raigne Arthur’s cause is overlooked in the
Bastard’s challenge to Austria (3. 1–62), but in King John the challenge
is parasitic upon Constance’s furious denouncement of Philip’s betrayal
of Arthur’s enterprise (3. 1. 1–57). The exchange between John and
Pandulph is likewise no longer simply about Stephen Langton, as it
was in The Troublesome Raigne (3. 63–132), as Constance’s frequent
interruptions remind the audience that Arthur’s fate is also involved
in the broken alliance between England and France (3. 1. 61–247).
Constance’s speech dwells obsessively on her son—‘Young Arthur’, ‘my
son’, ‘my poor child’, ‘my boy’, ‘my pretty Arthur’, ‘my absent child’,
‘my boy, my Arthur, my fair son’—caressing the signifiers for her child
because the child himself is absent.
Another of the subtle shifts by which Shakespeare has made Arthur
central is by associating him with Richard I, one of the talismanic
kings of England. John Sider has argued that in The Troublesome Raigne
‘the dramatist took special pains to qualify [John] as hero-martyr by
borrowing the aura of Richard I’.⁴⁰ Shakespeare has, however, shifted
the mantle of Richard I’s memory onto Arthur’s shoulders. Shakespeare
knows that Arthur is Geoffrey’s son not Richard’s (2. 1. 99–106,
124–7), but he also deliberately skews history to strengthen the blood-
bond between the hero-king and Arthur: King Philip tells Arthur that
Richard I is the ‘great forerunner of thy blood’ (2. 1. 2), Arthur describes
himself as Cœur-de-Lion’s ‘offspring’ (2. 1. 13) and Constance cries
that Arthur is Eleanor’s ‘eldest son’s son’ (2. 1. 177).
The strengthening of Arthur’s cause in King John interacts with a
corresponding weakening of the character of the King. In King John, for
example, Philip claims to have been forced to take up Arthur’s right by
divine order:
  In the name of God,
How comes it then that thou art called a king,
When living blood doth in these temples beat,
Which owe the crown that thou o’ermasterest?
  From whom hast thou this great commission, France,
³⁹ See Carol J. Carlisle, ‘Constance: A Theatrical Trinity’, in Deborah T. Curren-

Aquino, ed., King John: New Perspectives (New York: Garland, 1989), 144–64.
⁴⁰ The Troublesome Raigne, p. lxii.
To draw my answer from thy articles?
 . From that supernal judge that stirs good thoughts
In any breast of strong authority
To look into the blots and stains of right.
That judge has made me guardian to this boy.
(2. 1. 106–115)
Here, as throughout the play, John speaks in the interrogative mood:
questions typically replace statements in Shakespeare’s reworking of
John’s dialogue. John can only respond to Philip’s accusation with a
query which deflects Philip’s challenge, but not the truth of his assertion
of Arthur’s God-given right to rule. Philip may be motivated by policy,
just as he was in the source play, but John is unable to refute his rhetoric
of divinely sanctioned action.
The Troublesome Raigne opens with the presentation of John as the
new King of England, and he answers Chattilion’s request with majestic
defiance. King John omits these preliminaries and opens directly with
the question of Arthur’s right. This transfer of focus from John to
Arthur is mirrored in John’s weaker response to Chattilion’s challenge.
The French ambassador in King John openly calls the king a usurper
(1. 1. 13), and John’s reply—‘What follows if we disallow of this?’
(1. 1. 16)—sounds irresolute beside the stately contempt of his coun-
terpart in The Troublesome Raigne. Fundamental to Shakespeare’s new
conception of John’s reign is the elimination of John’s previous status as
a ‘warlike Christian’. John is portrayed as a less accomplished king from
the opening scene right through to his abdication: in The Troublesome
Raigne John is given over seventy lines to justify his submission to
Rome, and is clearly dissembling in his obeisance, but in King John the
scene is shorn of all such explanations and excuses and the audience is
simply presented with a king who has given his crown to a papal legate.
The uncertainty of John’s speech-acts in King John is the result of his
own insecurity and a signifier for his uncertain hold on power. In The
Troublesome Raigne John forces Philip to be the first to commit himself
to the citizen’s plan of marrying Lewes to Blanche (‘brother of Fraunce,
you heare the Citizens: | Then tell me, how you meane to deale herein’
(2. 53–4) ). In King John these words have been transferred to Philip
and it is John who has to hazard his response first: ‘speak England first,
that hath been forward first | To speak unto this city: what say you?’
(2. 1. 483–4). In The Troublesome Raigne the French campaign ends
with what was presumably staged as John’s daring rescue of his mother:
‘Elianor is rescued by John, and Arthur is taken prisoner’ (3. 191), but in
King John it is the Bastard and not the King who rescues her (3. 2. 7).
John’s weakness in King John is connected with his dubious right to
the throne, his ‘borrowed majesty’ (1. 1. 4). His insecurity quickens
his moral deterioration as it determines him to kill his nephew, and
Shakespeare has severely curtailed the events after Arthur’s death, so
that the descent of John and his designs into chaos follows more directly
from his criminal intent towards his nephew.
Arthur’s increased right to the throne makes John’s need to dispose
of him more pressing. The order for Arthur’s death is explicit in
Shakespeare, unlike in The Troublesome Raigne (in which he only
ostensibly orders his blinding), and Shakespeare conveys through the
King’s circumlocutions the horror even he has of voicing his command.
John orders Arthur’s death, and Hubert accedes to the order through a
shared line:
  Thou art his keeper.
 And I’ll keep him so
That he shall not offend your majesty. (3. 3. 64–5)
The word ‘keeper’ was suggested to Shakespeare by The Troublesome

Raigne, in which Hubert tells Arthur: ‘frolick yong Prince, though I your
keeper bee, | Yet shall your keeper live at your command’ (4. 36–7).⁴¹
The relaxed word ‘frolic’ and the courteous tone of Hubert’s second
line make it difficult to read these words as threatening. In King John,
however, the word ‘keeper’ has become ominous. Menace has been
created through the terseness of John’s utterance, which implies a secret
purpose to his words.⁴² In the context of a murder the word ‘keeper’
has become an allusion to Cain’s words: ‘am I my brother’s keeper?’
(Gen. 4: 9). The connection with Cain informs Hubert what the King
wants to be done to his brother’s child, and Hubert’s echo of his words
indicates his understanding of the implicit command.
The sense that John acts in defiance of God’s will runs like a seam
through the play, culminating in this Cain-like murder of his relative.
He stands ‘upon a slipp’ry place’ (3. 4. 137)—the place where God has
placed the wicked in Psalm 73.⁴³ Arthur’s first speech alludes, by contrast
⁴¹ See Shaheen, Biblical References in Shakespeare’s Plays, 400–1.

⁴² Joseph A. Porter, ‘Fraternal Pragmatics: Speech Acts of John and the Bastard’,
in Deborah T. Curren-Aquino, ed., King John: New Perspectives (New York: Garland,
1989), 137.
⁴³ ‘Thou hast set them in slipperie places’ (Ps. 73: 18).
to the Psalmist’s ‘hide me under the shadow of thy wings’ (17: 8), a
phrase which often denotes innocent suffering in Shakespeare.⁴⁴
God shall forgive you Coeur-de-lion’s death,
The rather that you give his offspring life,
Shadowing their right under your wings of war.
I give you welcome with a powerless hand,
But with a heart full of unstainèd love. (2. 1. 12–16)
Arthur’s first word is ‘God’ and throughout the play Arthur’s side claim
God’s sanction for their actions.⁴⁵ In King John it is the King’s side who
argue for power based on human authority and grounded in law, while
Arthur and the French argue for power granted by God alone.⁴⁶ This is
a dramatic change from the King who in The Troublesome Raigne is ‘a
warlike Christian’ who fights ‘for Christs true faith’ (‘To the Gentlemen
Readers’, 5–6). In the earlier play it is John who is chosen by God, and
the Catholic church which is trying to rob him of his divine right to
rule. In King John John’s majesty is a sham.⁴⁷ The King matches the
church in duplicity and it is Arthur who receives the mantle of divine
favour worn by his uncle in The Troublesome Raigne.
In the anonymous play, as in the chronicle sources, John’s greatness
meant that his downfall merited supernatural signs. In the accounts
of Foxe, Holinshed, and Wendover the appearance of five moons in
the heavens is a sign of John’s impending downfall, although in The
Troublesome Raigne the moment is staged as a smiling prophecy which
records England’s defiance of the pope. In both readings, however,
the astrological anomaly relates to John. In Shakespeare, however, the
heavenly portents are not connected with the downfall of the King, but
with that of Arthur:
 My lord, they say five moons were seen tonight,
Four fixèd, and the fifth did whirl about
The other four in wondrous motion.
⁴⁴ Shaheen, Biblical References in Shakespeare’s Plays, 402, 392–3. See also The Two
Noble Kinsmen, 1. 1. 91–2; Henry VIII, 5. 1. 161–2.
⁴⁵ Honigmann comments: ‘the French side in John claim the sanction of heaven
throughout, and John’s side that of hell’: King John, ed. E. A. J. Honigmann (London:
The Arden Shakespeare, 2000), note to 2. 1. 407.
⁴⁶ Donna B. Hamilton, Shakespeare and the Politics of Protestant England (London:
Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992), 47.
⁴⁷ Sandra Billington has shown how Shakespeare draws attention to John’s counterfeit
majesty by connecting him with player kings: Mock Kings in Medieval Society and
Renaissance Drama (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 125, 128.
  Five moons?
. Old men and beldams in the streets
Do prophesy upon it dangerously.
Young Arthur’s death is common in their mouths.
(4. 2. 183–8)
As Arthur is the true king, it is his death which causes disturbances in
the heavens.
A sense of being close to the divine at the moment of dying means
that historical and fictional accounts of princes’ deaths often share a
crystallizing of religious imagery at their demise. John’s death in The
Troublesome Raigne, as in Foxe, is the climax of the religious imagery
and biblical language which confers holiness upon him. Likewise in
King John it is at Arthur’s death that the five moons appear and the
Bastard has his epiphany, recognizing him as the true king: ‘How easy
dost thou take all England up!’ (4. 3. 143). A parallel staging at the
deaths of John and Arthur in the two plays forms a dramatic enactment
of the shift in the locus of holiness between them. In the Troublesome
Raigne the return of the nobles to the correct path is signified by their
kneeling in the presence of a body which gives their repentance validity:
the body of the dying king.
 Lords, give me leave to joy the dying King,
With sight of these his Nobles kneeling here
With daggers in their hands, who offer up
Their lives for ransome of their fowle offence. (15. 131–4)
In King John the nobles also kneel by a body to express a change of
purpose but this time the body beside which they kneel and make their
‘holy vow’ is Arthur’s:
 Kneeling before this ruin of sweet life,
And breathing to his breathless excellence
The incense of a vow, a holy vow,
Never to taste the pleasures of the world…
· · · · · · · · · ·
Till I have set a glory to this hand
By giving it the worship of revenge.
   Our souls religiously confirm thy words.
(4. 3. 65–73)
It is at the death of Arthur, as with the death of John in the earlier
accounts, that his position as the true king becomes clearest.
Shakespeare has invested Arthur’s death with a horror which is
not present in any of his sources. Throughout his career Shakespeare
manipulated audience emotion through the killing of children—from
the murder of Rutland to the slaughter of Macduff’s ‘babes’—and
Arthur’s youth is one of the primary ways in which Shakespeare invites
sympathy for him and turns the audience from John. As Hazlitt observed,
‘we are impelled to put the very worst construction on his meanness
and cruelty by the tender picture of the beauty and helplessness of the
object of it’.⁴⁸ The historical Arthur of Brittany was born in 1187 and
died at the age of 16. The earliest account of the reign, written by Roger
of Wendover during John’s rule, does not describe Arthur’s age, but
his behaviour to John—while suggesting someone young in the ways
of diplomacy—sounds too confident for a child: ‘Arthur ill-advisedly
replied to him with indignation and threats, and demanded of the
king that he should give up to him the kingdom of England … with
an oath’.⁴⁹ In Holinshed, Arthur is described as a ‘yoong gentleman’ a
phrase that encapsulates his liminal age, and in this text, his dealings
with the king retain their teenage swagger. The king asks him ‘to leane
and sticke to him being his naturall Vncle. But Arthur like one that
wanted good counsell, and abounding too much in his own wilfull
opinion, made a presumptuous answer’. In Foxe, likewise, Arthur’s
insolence places him in early manhood rather than late childhood.⁵⁰
Shakespeare’s Arthur is not only younger than he is in any of
the sources, his youth is valued as conferring innocence rather than
denigrated as indicating inexperience. In The Troublesome Raigne Arthur
is on the cusp of manhood and his age is manipulated according to the
desires of those who wish to direct him. Constance says his ‘yeares I see
are farre too greene’ (2. 448) because she does not want to take his advice;
Elinor calls him ‘yongling’ (2. 110) when being contemptuous; King
Philip says ‘bestirre thee man’ (3. 138) when he wants Arthur to believe
himself capable of fighting the English. The relatively impartial Citizen
of Angiers describes Arthur as one ‘who is but yong, and yet unmeete
to raigne’ (2. 339)—a criticism which Shakespeare has excised. In The
Troublesome Raigne Elinor’s ‘sir boy’ (3. 169) is an insult, but in King
John Arthur is called ‘boy’ throughout by his supporters: Lewis, Austria,
⁴⁸ The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe (London: J. M. Dent &
Sons, 1930–4), iv. 307.
⁴⁹ Roger of Wendover’s Flowers of History, ii. 205.
⁵⁰ Raphael Holinshed, The Third Volume of Chronicles, beginning at duke William the
Norman, commonlie called the Conqueror, and descending by degrees of yeeres and all the
kings and queenes of England in their orderlie successions (London, 1587), P3r ; Foxe, Actes
and Monuments, i. 250.
and King Philip all call him ‘noble boy’ (2. 1. 18), ‘fair boy’ (2. 1. 30),
and ‘boy’ (2. 1. 43) in quick succession at his first appearance. Likewise
Hubert’s ‘young lad’ and ‘little prince’ (4. 1. 8–9) suggest a tenderness
towards his vulnerability. Elinor’s insult from The Troublesome Raigne
has become a form of commendation because this Arthur is too young
to be offended by references to his age.⁵¹ In Shakespeare’s play Arthur’s
youth and innocence are valued, whereas in The Troublesome Raigne
they are simply impediments to his attempt on the crown.
The change in Arthur’s age, and more importantly in the way his
youth is presented, means that in King John he is uniquely innocent and
vulnerable. This childlike simplicity is something which Shakespeare
has added to his source and he strengthens it with an allusion to the
Old Testament child who is a type of Christ’s sacrifice: Isaac. The
scene of the near-blinding of Arthur draws some of its dramatic power
from its connections with the sacrifice of Isaac and the Passion of
Christ, which Isaac’s story was understood to prefigure. As discussed
in Chapter 2, Shakespeare’s mind often seems to have returned to the
dramatic presentation of the Passion when he wrote scenes of torture
and death. The near-blinding of Arthur seems likewise to have drawn
on the affective power of the mystery plays.⁵²
Sandra Billington and Roy Battenhouse have recognized that this
scene gathers some of its power from its scenic form which recalls the
sacrifice of Isaac. Roy Battenhouse, for example, states that Arthur’s
‘attitude of non-resistance to evil except through kindly questioning’
(which is unlike the ‘legalistic moralising’ of the young man in The
Troublesome Raigne) seems ‘to be modelled on the character of the
boy Isaac in mystery-play drama’.⁵³ However, the connection is closer
than either critic shows. The structural similarity on its own is striking:
⁵¹ This realization overturns, I think, Honigmann’s suggestion that the use of ‘boy’ in
both texts is evidence for the Troublesome Raigne’s ‘unintelligent echoing’ of Shakespeare’s
text: Honigmann, King John, 171.
⁵² The sacrifice of Isaac was understood as an especially moving theatrical event:
‘it is reported of Gregory Nyssen, that when hee saw but the shew and representation
of the sacrificing of Isaac, it made such an impression upon him, that he could not
forbeare weeping’: Richard Maden, Christs Love and Affection towards Jerusalem (London,
1637), E4v . Shakespeare’s presentation of the near-blinding of Arthur, likewise, came to
epitomize affecting spectacle in the Victorian era, as is shown by H. Rider Haggard’s
reference to it: King Solomon’s Mines (Harmondsworth: Puffin, 1885/1987), 147.
⁵³ Roy Battenhouse, ‘Religion in King John: Shakespeare’s View’, Connotations 1/2
(1991): 146–7. See also Sandra Billington, ‘A Response to Roy Battenhouse; ‘‘Religion in
King John: Shakespeare’s View’’ ’, Connotations 1/3 (1991): 290–2; Pugliatti, Shakespeare
the Historian, 91.
unexpected violence is offered to a young boy by someone acting under
orders from a higher power who had hitherto loved and protected him.
The order to kill the boy is rescinded and the boy escapes death despite
the helplessness of his situation. The position of Hubert, struggling
between two duties—the command of his king and his affection for
the boy in his care—has affinities with the position of Abraham caught
between God’s command and his love for his son. Most of all, perhaps,
the imaginative attention to the anxiety and suffering of the young boy,
which is unique to the performance of the story in the mystery plays,
seem to have influenced Shakespeare in his conception of the scene.⁵⁴
The typological importance of Isaac’s sacrifice ensured that it was
prominent among the Old Testament episodes staged in the mystery
cycles. A relatively large number of Abraham and Isaac plays have
survived: those in the cycles of Chester, N-town, Towneley, York, and
the Cornish Ordinalia, and two single plays known as the Northampton
and Brome Abraham plays.⁵⁵ In the Chester play the typology is
explicit: Abraham prefigures God the Father, and Isaac, his son: ‘by
Isaack understande I maye | Jesus that was obedyent aye’ (ll. 472–3).
Despite the suspicion felt by reformers about typology not explicitly
sanctioned by the Bible, the connection of Isaac and Christ was too
deeply rooted and widespread to disappear at the Reformation and
imagery linking Isaac and Christ continued to be commonplace.⁵⁶ Isaac
and his lamb were painted by Lucas Cranach in 1547 for the altar
screen in the Wittenberg church at which Luther preached. Lancelot
Andrewes’s emphatic defence of typology (in his 1604 Good Friday
sermon) included Isaac as one of the ‘types’ of Christ whose suffering
was fulfilled on the cross.⁵⁷
⁵⁴ Clifford Davidson, History, Religion, and Violence: Cultural Contexts for Medieval
and Renaissance English Drama (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), 124–48.
⁵⁵ Chester Mystery Cycle, play 4; N-Town Plays, play 5; Towneley Plays, play 4; The
York Plays, ed. Richard Beadle (London: Edward Arnold, 1982), play 10; The Cornish
Ordinalia: A Medieval Dramatic Trilogy, trans. Markham Harris (Washington, DC: The
Catholic University of America Press, 1969), 36 ff. The Brome and Northampton plays
are included in Non-Cycle Plays and Fragments, ed. Norman Davies,  1 (London: Early
English Text Society, 1970), plays 4 and 5.
⁵⁶ See e.g. ‘Prosopopeia: Containing the Teares of the holy, blessed, and sanctified
Marie, the Mother of God’ (1596), in The Complete Works of Thomas Lodge [1580–1673?]
(Glasgow: The Hunterian Club, 1883), iii. 17; Mary Désirée Anderson, Drama and
Imagery in English Medieval Churches (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963),
210.
⁵⁷ Schiller, Iconography, ii. 162 fig. 537; Andrewes, XCVI Sermons, Ii2v .
The image of the lamb, central to a typological understanding of
Christ’s Passion, is literalized in Isaac’s story. In Genesis the animal
which takes Isaac’s place is described as a ram (Gen. 22: 13): the Chester
cycle begins by following the biblical precedent and Abraham sees ‘an
horned wether’ caught in the thicket. But the angel’s words ‘a lambe
that is both good and gaye’ and the stage direction—‘then let Abraham
take the lambe and kyll him’ (4. 440, 434, 443)—indicate that a lamb
was used. A 1498 note for the Corpus Christi celebrations in Dublin
lists ‘a lamb’ among the stage properties for the Abraham pageant,
which indicates that the Chester staging was not unique.⁵⁸ The lamb
created a visual link with the sacrificial Lamb of God, but it was not
simply invented by the typology-seeking authors of the mystery plays.
In the biblical account Isaac asks ‘where is the lambe for the burnt
offering?’ and Abraham answers: ‘my sonne, God will prouide him a
lambe’ (22: 7–8).
A lamb is one of the most ubiquitous metaphors for Christ during his
Passion. The image expresses his innocence, his symbolic relationship
with the lamb slaughtered for the Passover meal, and his typological
fulfilment of the prophecies of Isaiah. The New Testament itself
authorized a typological reading of Isaiah 53:7 (‘hee is brought as a
sheepe to the slaughter, and as a sheepe before her shearer is dumme, so
he openeth not his mouth’). In a rare moment of overt typology in the
New Testament, Acts records Philip’s reading of this passage in Isaiah
as a prefiguration of Christ:
Nowe the place of the Scripture which he read, was this, He was led as a sheepe
to the slaughter: and like a lambe dumme before his shearer, so opened he
not his mouth… Then the Eunuch answered Philip, and sayd, I pray thee of
whome speaketh the Prophet this? of himselfe, or of some other man? Then
Philip opened his mouth, and began at the same Scripture, and preached vnto
him Iesus. (Acts 8: 32–35)
Isaiah 53 is the Old Testament reading for Good Friday Evensong in
the Book of Common Prayer, and even the annotators of the Geneva
Bible explicitly glossed the passage with reference to the Passion.
It is as a lamb, suffering and silent like the lamb in Isaiah, that Arthur
describes himself at the beginning of Act 4 scene 1:
Alas, what need you be so boisterous-rough?
I will not struggle; I will stand stone-still
⁵⁸ Chambers, Mediaeval Stage, ii. 364.

· · · · · · · ·
Drive these men away,
And I will sit as quiet as a lamb;
I will not stir, nor wince, nor speak a word,
Nor look upon the iron angerly.
Thrust but these men away, and I’ll forgive you,
Whatever torment you do put me to.
(4. 1. 75–83)
Arthur’s promises of silence and forgiveness recall the dumb lamb of

Isaiah and Christ’s words to his tormentors: ‘Father, forgiue them’ (Luke
23: 34). Earlier in the scene Arthur longs to be a shepherd: ‘So I were
out of prison and kept sheep, | I should be as merry as the day is long’
(4. 1. 17–18). Like Henry VI (3 Henry VI, 2. 5. 21–54), Arthur desires
to take the metaphorical identification of kings and shepherds literally,
but in King John the pastoral image’s Christian source is emphasized
when Arthur thinks of himself not only as a shepherd but also as
a lamb. The connection between Isaac (who is replaced by a lamb),
Christ (the Lamb of God), and the ovine obedience which links them
both to the suffering servant of Isaiah is succinctly expressed by the
seventeenth-century preacher Samuel Mather:
Isaac was an eminent Type of Christ in regard to his Death and Sufferings.
Isaac without resistance, without repining or reply, willingly yields himself to
his Father even unto Death: So was Christ obedient to his Father even unto
Death. So each of them was led away like a Lamb to the slaughter, as is said of
Christ, Isai 53.7. Act 8.32.⁵⁹
The lamb imagery, like Arthur’s passive non-resistance and the promise
to remain dumb, is Shakespeare’s addition to his sources.
Arthur repeatedly promises to be silent, although in fact he will
be voluble in his own defence: his resistance through ‘innocent prate’
follows the mystery play dramatization of the story of Isaac, rather than
the biblical account. A lamb’s inability to resist is one reason why it
is used as an image for the suffering of Isaac, Christ, and Arthur, and
Isaac’s willing participation increased the exemplary and typological
function of his story in Christian exegesis.⁶⁰ However, among the
surviving medieval dramatizations of the story it is only in the N-town
play that Isaac capitulates without a murmur. In all the other pageants
⁵⁹ Samuel Mather, The Figures or Types of the Old Testament […] (London, 1685), 107.
⁶⁰ Chester Mystery Cycle, 2. 55.
he, like Arthur, offers no active resistance but tries to preserve his life
through persuasion. The Northampton play has a touching moment
when Isaac having resolutely asked ‘bynde myne hanndes and my leggs
fast’ (5. 224) yet cannot help but say ‘A, soffte, gentil fader; ye bynde
me sore’ (5. 229). In the Cornish play likewise, after Isaac’s brave and
resolute ‘if it is his [God’s] will, I shan’t resist’, he asks to be bound but
as he articulates the idea his determination begins to melt away: ‘Dearest
father, tie my hands and legs with the rope, tie them tight, so I won’t be
able to get to my feet. For unless I’m tied down, I might run away when
I feel the bite of the flames … . The pain will be cruel, father beloved,
before I’m burned to ashes’ (p. 37). The second blandishment—‘father
beloved’—does not sound as natural as the first, and its placing suggests
that Isaac is using the language of affection to try to dissuade Abraham
from his action. In King John likewise Arthur’s resolution breaks as he
considers what is about to happen:
If heaven be pleased that you must use me ill,
Why then you must. Will you put out mine eyes,
These eyes that never did, nor never shall,
So much as frown on you?
(4. 1. 55–8)
The dissolving resolve dramatized in Isaac’s response is expressed in

Arthur’s speech by the medial caesura in line 56. As with Isaac in
the Cornish and Northampton plays, Arthur’s initial acceptance of his
suffering as God’s will is overtaken by an instinctive desire for life.
In King John, as in most of the medieval dramatizations of the Isaac
story, the boy attempts to dissuade his would-be murderer from his
purpose through tenderness. In both contexts the child stresses the
relationship which binds man and boy, and although Hubert is not
Arthur’s father, Arthur dwells on the ties of affection as if they had the
strength of a filial bond for this fatherless child. While still unaware of
his danger, he says ‘I would to heaven | I were your son, so you would
love me, Hubert’ (4. 1. 23–4). This explicit desire for paternal love is
not present in the sources, and is part of Shakespeare’s new conception
of the scene. In the chronicles and The Troublesome Raigne Arthur
attempts to escape not through submissive love, but through threats
and violence. In The Troublesome Raigne Arthur argues vigorously for
his release and prays for Hubert’s damnation: ‘then doo thy charge,
and charged be thy soule | With wrongfull persecution done this day’
(7. 103). In The English Chronicle of Radulph of Coggeshall Arthur fights
against the man who has come to mutilate him and ‘laid hands violently
on that man to avenge his own destruction’.⁶¹
A practical reason for this difference is that Shakespeare has trans-
formed a young man with the power to resist into a helpless child.
In all but one of the mystery cycles, Isaac is likewise too young to
oppose his father physically. In the York play, however, Abraham tells
the audience that his son is just over 30 years old: ‘he is of eelde to reken
right | Thyrty yere and more sumdele’ (10. 81–2). This playwright has
decided to make the typological connection between Isaac and Christ
explicit by making them the same age—Christ was traditionally 33
when he died.⁶² However, in Genesis 22: 5 Isaac is described as a
‘childe’ and in almost all iconography his is portrayed as a young boy.
The York playwright’s ingenuity is considered unnecessary by the other
cycle dramatists because having a child prefigure Christ is typologically
accurate in a more fundamental way than simple identity of age: chil-
dren possess an innocence that Christ alone retains in adulthood. As
Rosemary Woolf has argued, Isaac is a particularly suitable type of Christ
because, like him, he possessed innocence per naturam.⁶³ Shakespeare is
using Arthur’s youth to a similar purpose. He alters Arthur’s age from his
sources to make him innocent, and this ingenuousness is strengthened
through the dramaturgical connection of his near-blinding with the
sacrifice of Isaac.
The Old Testament imagery in which the suffering servant was
imagined as a dumb beast was fulfilled by Christ’s non-resistance to
torture and by his silence at his trial. The imagery was also recalled in
minor details of Christ’s Passion, such as his being tied like an animal.
The Christian iconography of the Isaac plays meant that Isaac’s binding
was typologically understood as fulfilled by the binding of the Lamb of
God (John 18: 12). The brief reference to Isaac’s binding in Genesis
was extrapolated in the mystery plays to make his sufferings closer to
those of the Passion.⁶⁴ Great stress is likewise laid on Arthur being
restrained: ‘bind the boy which you shall find with me | Fast to the
chair’ (4. 1. 4–5), ‘bind him here’ (4. 1. 74), ‘For God’s sake, Hubert,
⁶¹ Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources, iv. 57–8.

⁶² See Davidson, History, Religion, and Violence, 131.
⁶³ Rosemary Woolf, ‘The Effect of Typology on the English Mediaeval Plays of
Abraham and Isaac’, Speculum 32 (1957): 814.
⁶⁴ Thomas Rendall, ‘Visual Typology in the Abraham and Isaac Plays’, Modern
Philology 81 (1984): 227. The binding of Isaac is explicitly mentioned and staged in the
Chester, York, Brome, Northampton, and Cornish plays.
let me not be bound!’ (4. 1. 77). Unlike Isaac, Arthur is seated in
order to be bound, but this incidental detail may also echo the staging
of the Passion. Although there is no biblical account of Christ being
seated during his torture, this was a popular staging, and was performed
in at least the Chester, N-town, York, and Towneley cycles.⁶⁵ Being
seated dramatizes Jesus’ passivity, but it is also one of the attributes of
royalty mockingly conferred on Jesus by his tormentors. On the stage
the ‘cathedram’ (Chester Mystery Cycle, 16. 69) could look like a parodic
throne.⁶⁶ In the Towneley play the second torturer mocks Christ by
pretending the seat is a place of honour:
Com, syt, and syt downe.
Must ye be prayde?
Lyke a lord of renowne,
Youre sete is arayde. (21. 521–4)
Such mocking of Christ through violent inversions of the trappings of
royalty, such as the crown of thorns or the purple robe of blood, is
undercut by the knowledge that Christ is more truly a king than his
tormentors can comprehend. The appalling jokes of the torturers of the
Towneley Crucifixion play, who claim as they nail Christ to the cross to
be mounting him like a ‘kyng … apon youre palfray’ (23. 108–14), gain
their dramatic power from their unconscious accuracy.⁶⁷ This broken
man is the King of Kings.
The allusion to the Crucifixion in the Isaac plays is strengthened by
the blindfolding of Isaac, as well as the binding. Isaac’s blindfolding
is non-biblical but occurs in most of the mystery plays.⁶⁸ Christ was
blindfolded as part of the sufferings inflicted on him during the Passion
(Mark 14: 65, Luke 24: 62) and Isaac’s blindfolding is another example
of Christian interpreters altering Isaac’s story in order to make it a
clearer prefiguration of Christ’s sacrifice. In the York play Isaac asks to
⁶⁵ Chester Mystery Cycle, 16. 69; N-town Play, 29. 180; York Plays, 29. 354–9;
Towneley plays, 21. 497–515. The Towneley episode lays the most stress on the stool and
stage business is made out of the disobedient servant Froward who objects to fetching
it. For the connection between this chair and the one to which Gloucester is bound, see
Guilfoyle, Shakespeare’s Play within Play, 118.
⁶⁶ For a pictorial representation in which Christ is enthroned in his torture chair see
James H. Marrow, Passion Iconography in Northern European Art of the Late Middle Ages
and Early Renaissance: A Study of the Transformation of Sacred Metaphor into Descriptive
Narrative (Kortrijk: Van Ghemmert, 1979), fig. 103.
⁶⁷ See Kolve, Play called Corpus Christi, 193.
⁶⁸ N-Town Play, 5. 179, Chester Mystery Cycle, 4. 386–9, York Plays, 10. 288–9,
Brome play, l. 289.
be blindfolded for the enigmatic reason, ‘than may youre offerand be
parfite’ (10. 289). This older Isaac seems to have some understanding
of the typological implications of his suffering: the reference to a perfect
offering projects forward to the Crucifixion that will be enacted later
in the cycle. In King John the audience witnesses not a blindfolding
but a near-blinding, but the stage property needed in the Isaac play—a
kerchief—is likewise present at this moment, as Arthur touches on
his kindness to Hubert: ‘when your head did but ache | I knit my
handkerchief about your brows’ (4. 1. 41–2).
The Bible recounts the blindfolding of Christ, but in some versions
of the secret Passion this was extended into an actual blinding. The
secret Passion was a response to the desire for fuller accounts of Christ’s
death, to facilitate empathetic devotion to the details of his suffering.
The episodes mentioned by the Evangelists—the arrest, the mocking,
the scourging, and the crowning with thorns—were all filled out
with descriptive detail culled from the Old Testament. The rise in
devotion to the suffering of Christ in the late Middle Ages led to an
inventive expansion of Passion imagery in which the simple formulas
of earlier centuries were replaced by elaborately detailed descriptions
drawn from an understanding of the literal fulfilment of Old Testament
imagery.⁶⁹ Many of the details of the secret Passion, therefore, survived
the Reformation because they were based on biblical texts. One of
the events in the secret Passion—the blinding of Christ—has been
recognized as possibly influencing Shakespeare in his presentation of
the torture of Gloucester in King Lear. In the Towneley play of the
buffeting, the Wakefield master expands on the biblical blindfolding,
and Caiaphas threatens to blind Christ: ‘Nay, bot I shall out-thrist | Both
his een on a raw’ (21. 79–80). The blinding of Gloucester is connected
to the near-blinding of Christ through numerous small details: the chair,
the plucking out of the victim’s beard, and the excitable sadism of the
torturer, as well as his awareness that the law prohibits him from killing
his victim.⁷⁰
The near-blinding in the Towneley play draws on a wealth of typo-
logical history that tried to square the evidence of the Gospels with the
Old Testament types of Christ such as Samson. As J. W. Robinson has
⁶⁹ As Pickering and Marrow have shown, the ultimate source for all secret Passion
imagery is biblical: F. P. Pickering, Literature & Art in the Middle Ages (London:
Macmillan, 1970); Marrow, Passion Iconography, 196, and passim.
⁷⁰ Beatrice Groves, ‘Now wole I a newe game begynne’.
pointed out the Towneley Caiaphas is echoing the Philistines who put
out Samson’s eyes, which is one of the standard types of the mocking.⁷¹
Samson became a ubiquitous type of Christ, and even during the sev-
enteenth century almost every event in his life—from his miraculous
birth to his triumphant death—could be understood as a prefiguration
of Christ.⁷² The deep connections perceived between Samson and Jesus
led to the belief that Christ too might have been blinded as one of his
torments. James Marrow suggests that the juxtaposition of illustrations
of the crowning with thorns and the blinding of Samson prepared the
way for the merging of the two in the secret Passion. Marrow relates
that during the crowning with thorns, ‘the majority of Netherlandic
Passion tracts report that the thorns pierced Christ’s eyes, or at least His
eyelids or brows’.⁷³ The identification may also have been facilitated
by a possible verbal slippage as the medieval word ‘blind-fellen’ means
both ‘to blind, strike blind’ and ‘to blindfold’.⁷⁴
The actual blinding that Christ suffers in some versions of the secret
Passion relates to the blinding of Gloucester, but the near-blinding of
the Towneley play seems closer to the threatened blinding in King John.
This latter scene shares with the mystery plays and secret Passion the
imagery of the lamb and many details of threatened torture, such as
being bound, burnt, and blinded.⁷⁵ The Passion imagery surrounding
Arthur’s near-blinding confers authority on him, and marks out his
innocence, innocence which will finally free him from danger. In the
⁷¹ J. W. Robinson, Studies in Fifteenth-century Stagecraft (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Medieval

Institute Publications, 1991), 185.
⁷² For late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century examples see The Sermons of Edwin
Sandys, D.D., successively Bishop of Worcester and London, and Archbishop of York; to which
are added some miscellaneous pieces, by the same author, ed. John Ayre (Cambridge: Parker
Society, 1841), 370–1; Certaine Sermons or Homilies Appointed to be Read in Churches
In the Time of Queen Elizabeth I (1547–71), ed. Mary Ellen Riches and Thomas B.
Stroup (Gainesville, Fla.: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1968), 191; Andrewes, XCVI
Sermons, 473; Joseph Hall, Contemplations Vpon the principal passages of the holie Historie
(London, 1615), 191, 280.
⁷³ Marrow, Passion Iconography, 141–2, fig. 85. See also M. R. James, ‘Pictor in
Carmine’, Archaelogia 94 (1951): 161. A similar picture in a German text is accompanied
by cryptic words that suggest that Christ too is blinded: J. E. Weis-Liebersdorf, Das
Kirchenjahr in 156 Gotischen Federzeichnugen: Ulrich von Lilienfeld und die Eichstatten
Evangelienpostille: Studien zur Geschichte der Armenbibel und Ihrer Fortbilungen (Strasburg:
J. H. Ed. Heitz, 1913), 44.
⁷⁴ For an example of its use in this context, see Rolle, English Writings, 33.
⁷⁵ See also the connection between the ‘hot irons’ to be used on Arthur, and the
burning of Christ during the secret Passion, which connects with his sacrificial status as
a burnt offering: Marrow, Passion Iconography, 117–22; Ryan, ‘Marlowe’s Edward II ’,
478–9.
speech that finally persuades Hubert, Arthur describes how the blinding
iron:
Will sparkle in your eyes,
And, like a dog that is compelled to fight,
Snatch at his master that doth tarre him on.
All things that you should use to do me wrong
Deny their office; only you do lack
That mercy which fierce fire and iron extends.
(4. 1. 114–19)
The power of innocence is here given supernatural agency that only man
ignores. Even dogs (traditionally associated with Christ’s tormentors)
are imagined as losing their desire for blood.⁷⁶ The rhetoric in which
the cruelty of man is highlighted by the mercy of animals and inanimate
objects is a version of the stories in which flora and fauna flocked to hear
St Francis and Bede preach when man was too hard-hearted to listen or
the cherry tree that bows to Mary in the face of her husband’s rancour
in the Coventry carol. The respect of the lifeless and bestial for Christ
was used as a rhetorical device for showing the ignorance of man when
even the lower orders of creation recognized their creator. The birth of
Christ was virtually unnoticed by humans, but the whole of the animal
kingdom—not just the ox and ass—is reputed to have recognized the
creator and sung out for joy.⁷⁷ In the Passion plays too, God’s creation
is aware that he is present, even when man is obdurate and ignorant. In
the York cycle the banners of the Jews dip in homage to Jesus and the
strong men carrying them cannot hold them erect.⁷⁸ Arthur’s reference
to the hot irons refusing to attack him is part of the traditional belief
that even inanimate objects will obey the innocent; and in particular the
epitome of innocence, Christ.
As discussed in Chapter 2, in Shakespeare’s plays the portrayal of the
body in pain often seems to recall the most powerful dramatic enactment
of suffering of his youth. In both the death of York and the blinding
of Gloucester specific words and actions, as well as the underlying
⁷⁶ Psalm 22: 16 tells how ‘dogges haue compassed me, and the assemblie of the wicked
have inclosed me: they perced my hands and my feete’. This Psalm was widely recognized
as prefiguring the Passion (cf. the Geneva annotations) and Christ’s tormentors were
therefore frequently depicted as dogs: Marrow, Passion Iconography, 33, 36–9, 201,
figs. 3, 4, 6, 22, 25–7.
⁷⁷ For this legend and the evidence for Shakespeare’s knowledge of it, see June
Osborne, John Piper and Stained Glass (Stroud: Sutton, 1997), 149–52.
⁷⁸ York Plays, 33. 168 ff.
imagery and dramaturgical ideas, point to the affective paradigm of
Christ’s suffering in the Gospels and its staging in the mystery plays.
Arthur’s near-blinding likewise, especially in its scenic form which
recalls the dramaturgy of the Abraham and Isaac plays, is a moment
when innocence threatened with insupportable pain and death recalls
the Passion. Arthur does not become a Christ-figure, and his apparent
resurrection from death (in John’s eyes) is followed immediately by his
actual demise. Nevertheless the links with the Passion strengthen the
constant reiteration of Arthur’s party that they fight for the true heir.
King John is an intensely political play, and the biblical echoes not only
give Arthur a holiness that sets him apart from the machinations of the
others, they also lend underlying support to his cause.
Religious imagery was used throughout Elizabeth’s reign to strengthen
her claim to be a divinely appointed ruler. In The Troublesome Raigne
John’s position as a prefiguration of a Protestant monarch is consolidated
through his biblical rhetoric, but in Shakespeare’s play the crypto-
religious quality has been removed from the centre of usurped power
and bestowed on the innocent holder of the right to the throne. In
King John majesty has not lost its sacredness, but John has lost his
majesty. Shakespeare does not abandon the association between religion
and royalty, but by conferring the talismanic power of biblical language
onto the dispossessed child, rather than the powerful man, he invests
his play with an underlying critique of the royalist agenda. Arthur’s
situation has an elusive connection with the sufferings of the secret
Passion through which Jesus’ kingship was mocked: seated on a parodic
throne and nearly blinded by a crown of thorns. This travesty of royalty
was inflicted on the King of Kings, and Arthur’s torture, by recalling
the Passion, recalls also Christ’s hidden royal status. King John shares
with the New Testament and the mystery plays a radical social agenda
in which true royalty belongs to the dispossessed.
5
‘Covering discretion with a coat of folly’:
The Redemptive Self-Fashioning of Hal
In King John, the transfer of biblical imagery from the king to a helpless
boy is analogous to the Gospel inversion in which divine kingship is
found in a carpenter’s son. Shakespeare’s relocation of sacred language
and imagery onto the dispossessed Arthur has a subversive edge in that
it illustrates that sanctity is not connected with sovereignty. In the
second tetralogy, Shakespeare likewise questions the explicit cultivation
of holiness by those in pursuit of secular power. The second tetralogy as
a whole, and 1 Henry IV in particular, focuses upon Hal’s growth into
kingship.¹ In The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth (1586) the dissolute
prince repents of his waywardness and reforms. But in 1 Henry IV no real
reformation takes place, as Hal’s early soliloquy reveals to the audience.
The prodigal son narrative evolves into a different Christian story: a story
about masked power which is only truly recognized through a redemptive
battle with the enemy. This story is one model of the Atonement, and
it was visualized on the medieval stage in the harrowing of hell play
in which Christ revealed his glory and vanquished his enemies. Hal
likewise stages his redemption through concealing his royalty—living
among his inferiors and disguising himself in their clothes—before
revealing himself in a climactic battle which carries specific resonances
of both the Crucifixion and harrowing. Hal combines the politically
¹ For the critical crux over Hal’s characterization, see Hazlitt, Complete Works,
iv. 285–6; Norman Rabkin, Shakespeare and the Problem of Meaning (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1981), 49, 55–62; Matthew H. Wikander, ‘The Protean Prince Hal’,
Comparative Drama 26/4 (1992–3): 295–311; Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations,
40–65; Altman, ‘ ‘‘Vile Participation’’ ’, 8 and passim; Robert Ornstein, A Kingdom
for a Stage: The Achievement of Shakespeare’s History Plays (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1972), 125–202; Sherman H. Hawkins, ‘Virtue and Kingship in
Shakespeare’s Henry the Fourth part I ’, English Literary Renaissance 5 (1975): 313–43;
Gordon Ross Smith, ‘Shakespeare’s Henry V : Another Part of the Critical Forest’, Journal
of the History of Ideas 37 (1976): 3–26.
122 The Redemptive Self-Fashioning of Hal
astute rule of his father with the sacral kingship of the man his father
deposed, to create a brilliantly effective, if somewhat cynical, form of
government. Hal revives the idea of a holy monarchy beloved of Richard
II as part of his strategic assault on the affections of his country, and he
manipulates his charisma through acting out the Richardian rhetoric of
divine kingship.
The second tetralogy opens with the politically inept Richard II who
overtly styles himself as a Christ figure. Hal is an astute observer, and
Richard’s self-portrayal as quasi-divine is recalled in the new prince’s
search for a perfect model of kingship. Hal revives Richard’s imagery to
invest his actions with the legitimating aura of divinity, but he utilizes
religious language with subtlety and political insight and never overtly
equates his own power and mission with Christ’s. The appearance
of holiness, however, is essential for Hal as he attempts to prove his
legitimacy. In the source play, The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth,
the prince’s behaviour leads to a serious danger of disinheritance: ‘I heare
say, if he use it long, | His father will cut him off from the Crowne.’² An
audience familiar with the earlier play, therefore, might hear a genuine
threat in Henry IV’s desire to discover that Hal and Hotspur had been
swapped in the cradle, so that he could have ‘his Harry, and he mine’
(1. 1. 89). In his father’s eyes Hal has to prove himself a true son, and in
the eyes of his country he has to prove himself a true prince, not simply
the heir of a usurping monarch. Hal needs to forge a connection with
the legitimate king, Richard II. To Henry IV the parallel between his
son and the man he has deposed is a matter for lament:
  For all the world,
As thou art at this hour was Richard then,
When I from France set foot at Ravenspurgh. (3. 2. 93–5)
In fact, Hal’s scheme of ‘redeeming time’ (1. 2. 214) relies precisely
on the appearance of such Richardian dissipation. Hal utilizes the
assumption that he is truly idle (as Richard was) in order that his
reformation ‘shall show more goodly, and attract more eyes | Than
that which hath no foil to set it off’ (1. 2. 210–13). Hal’s strategy
is strengthened by the fact that the English have already suffered
under a politically inept and pleasure-loving king. Hal, however, affects
Richard’s rhetoric, as well as his behaviour, and likewise shapes and
sharpens it into a powerful political tool.
² Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources, iv. 302.

The Redemptive Self-Fashioning of Hal 123
Richard II is the play in which Shakespeare describes his monarch
in the most strikingly Christological terms.³ Throughout Richard’s
fall from power he repeatedly compares Christ’s suffering with his
own. On the apparent desertion of his followers he calls them ‘three
Judases, each one thrice-worse than Judas!’ (3. 2. 128). Subjected to the
insubordination of Northumberland, York, and Bolingbroke, Richard
once again finds an analogue in Christ’s betrayal:
Yet I well remember
The favours of these men. Were they not mine?
Did they not sometime cry ‘All hail!’ to me?
So Judas did to Christ. But He in twelve
Found truth in all but one; I, in twelve thousand, none.
(4. 1. 158–62)
In his deposition scene he tells the onlookers:

Though some of you, with Pilate, wash your hands,
Showing an outward pity, yet you Pilates
Have here delivered me to my sour cross,
And water cannot wash away your sin.
(4. 1. 229–32)
Although there is little of such language in Shakespeare’s primary sources,

French chronicles sympathetic to Richard, circulating in London at this
time and owned by such men as John Stow and John Dee, do compare
him to Christ. In Créton’s Histoire du Roy d’Angleterre Richard the
narratorial voice makes the connection explicit:
Then spake Duke Henry quite aloud to the commons of the said city, ‘Fair
Sirs, behold your king! consider what you will do with him!’ And they made
answer with a loud voice, ‘We will have him taken to Westminster.’ And so
he delivered him unto them. At this hour did he remind me of Pilate, who
caused our Lord Jesus Christ to be scourged at the stake, and afterwards had
him brought before the multitude of the Jews, saying, ‘Fair Sirs, behold your
king!’⁴
³ See King Richard II, ed. Peter Ure, The Arden Shakespeare (London: Routledge,
1994), pp. xlviii, lxii; Shaheen, Biblical References in Shakespeare’s Plays, 374–5, 380–3.
⁴ John Webb, ‘Translation of a French Metrical History of the Deposition of King
Richard the Second, written by a Contemporary, and comprising the Period from his last
Expedition into Ireland to his death; from an MS formerly belonging to Charles of Anjou,
Earl of Maine and Mortair; but now preserved in the British Museum; accompanied
by Prefatory Observations, Notes, and an Appendix; with a Copy of the Original’,
If Shakespeare was influenced by the French tradition which portrayed
Richard as an innocent, Christlike victim, he has radically changed the
import of the allusions. As Emrys Jones comments:
the fact that Richard compares himself to Christ may be a symptom of radical
difference, not likeness … the effect is to draw our attention to his bold and
startling figure of speech, and, far from making us see Richard as another Christ,
we are perhaps surprised into noticing the differences between them—Richard
is, among other things, a man who finds such comparisons appropriate.⁵
Unlike Créton’s Histoire, in which it is the narrator who links Richard’s
situation to the Passion, in Richard II it is the king who marks the
resemblance. Such a change is a necessary function of a non-choric
drama, but it is also reveals a new self-absorption in the parallels.
While the French chronicles may reveal the original source of these
allusions, it is possible that their subversive tenor can be traced instead to
a native production. The influence of Marlowe’s Edward II on Richard
II is considerable, going far beyond the core similarities of shared
plot, characterization, and structure.⁶ It is therefore likely, consider-
ing Shakespeare’s engagement with Marlowe’s work, that the complex
Christological matrix that surrounds Edward influenced Richard’s iden-
tification of himself with Christ. Marlowe follows the chronicles in
styling Edward’s torments on the Passion. As Patrick Ryan has shown,
all the insults and tortures suffered by Edward are present in narratives
of the secret Passion.⁷ In Edward II, as in Dr Faustus, the allusion
to Christ’s death in the downfall of the protagonist intensifies the
flamboyant violence of the final scene and tinges it with a frisson of
Archaelogia 20 (1824): 179. See also Chronique de la Traïson et Mort de Richart Deux Roy
Dengleterre, ed. and trans. Benjamin Williams (London: Aux dépens de la Société, 1846),
198–9, 201. For evidence of Shakespeare’s knowledge of this text see King Richard II, ed.
John Dover Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1951), pp. xxxix–xlvii.
⁵ Jones, Origins, 56.
⁶ For the connections between the two plays see Wickham, Shakespeare’s Dramatic
Heritage, 165–9; Maurice Charney, ‘Marlowe’s Edward II as Model for Shakespeare’s
Richard II ’, Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama 33 (1994): 31–41; Charles
R. Forker, ‘Marlowe’s Edward II and its Shakespearean Relatives: The Emergence of
a Genre’, in John W. Velz, ed., Shakespeare’s English Histories: A Quest for Form and
Genre (Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1996), 81–8;
Meredith Skura, ‘Marlowe’s Edward II : Penetrating Language in Shakespeare’s Richard
II’, Shakespeare Survey 50 (1997): 41–55.
⁷ Ryan, ‘Marlowe’s Edward II ’, 465–95. Many of these secret Passion sufferings were
also present in Stow; see The Chronicles of England, from Brute vnto this present yeare of
Christ, 1580 (London, 1580), 356.
blasphemy. Richard’s overt comparison of his situation with Christ’s,
and his portrayal of his sufferings as a ‘sour cross’, may owe more
to Marlowe’s shock tactics than the French chroniclers’ pious, royalist
alignment of a king’s suffering with Christ’s. Richard is a victim, and
his suffering deserves sympathy, but his Christological imagery is part
of his unashamed self-exaltation and inability to recognize his own
responsibility for his situation, rather than a glorification of his piety.
Richard’s identification of himself with Christ is one facet of his
political ineptitude. Richard, like Gaunt, thinks that the king is ‘God’s
substitute | His deputy anointed in his sight’ and that none of his
subjects would dare to ‘lift | An angry arm against his minister’ (1. 3.
37–41). For Richard religious rhetoric is a refuge. He believes himself
to be unassailable: ‘the breath of worldly men cannot depose | The
deputy elected by the Lord’ (3. 2. 53–4). Through Richard’s assertion
that ‘God for his Richard hath in heavenly pay | A glorious angel’
(3. 2. 56–7), Shakespeare has created a Christological allusion out of
Gloucester’s confidence in Woodstock that ‘God’s holy angel guards a
just man’s life’.⁸ Woodstock is quoting from Psalm 34: 7—‘the angell
of the Lorde taryeth rounde about them that feare him: and delivereth
them’—but Richard’s version, through its specificity (the angel is only
for him, not for any just man) and the chime of ‘pay’ and ‘pray’, alludes
instead to Christ’s words: ‘thinkest thou, that I can not nowe pray to
my Father, and he wil give me mo then Twelve legions of Angels?’
(Matt. 26: 53). The ethical bleaching that has transformed prayer into
hire—the substitution of ‘pay’ for ‘pray’ brings into play the numismatic
meaning of ‘angel’—is part of the instability of Richard’s self-portrayal
as the Christ. Hal’s revival of Richard’s religious language, however,
shares neither its complacency nor its innocence. Richard believes in his
uniquely holy status, Hal is merely anxious that others should believe
in it, and he stages his reformation by imbuing his behaviour with an
Incarnational aura.
Hal understands, as Machiavelli put it, that ‘it is necessary to know
well how to colour this nature, and to be a great pretender and
dissembler … [for] everyone sees how you appear, few touch what
you are’.⁹ Later Christianizers of Machiavelli were to understand this
⁸ William A. Armstrong, Elizabethan History Plays (London: Oxford University Press,

1965), 245. See Shaheen, Biblical References in Shakespeare’s Plays, 373–4.
⁹ Niccolò dei Machiavelli, The Prince, trans. Harvey C. Mansfield (Chicago: Univer-
sity of Chicago Press, 1998), 70–1.
principle of the necessary participation in evil and dissimulation by the
Prince as an imitation of the Incarnation, in which divinity becomes
fused with fallen humanity.¹⁰ Hal likewise attempts to infuse his
Machiavellian dissimulation of his true nature with an aura of the
Incarnation: a descent to the mortal world of the tavern, which is
employed to hide his true royalty. In both parts of Henry IV there is
an early cozening scene in the sub-plot which holds in microcosm the
Incarnational allusion of Hal’s dissimulation. In 2 Henry IV Hal tricks
Falstaff by putting on the leather jerkin and apron of a servant, and says:
‘from a god to a bull? A heavy descension! It was Jove’s case. From a
prince to a prentice? A low transformation’ (2. 2. 165–7). This jest of
a prince becoming a serving man is couched in pagan terms, but ‘Jove’
was a ubiquitous signifier for the Christian God at this time, especially
in the theatre.¹¹ Hal’s joke contains a veiled allusion to another god
who did not scorn to stoop so low: Jesus Christ ‘who being in the forme
of God, thought it no robberie to be equal with God: But hee made
himselfe of no reputation, and tooke on him the forme of a seruant’
(Philippians 2: 6). Hal alludes to the Incarnation, but is unwilling to
undergo the humility which the analogy entails. He soon throws off his
servant’s garments and leaves the tavern never to return.
Hal’s resonant dressing of himself as a servant brings into focus the
Incarnational analogue of his behaviour. There is a parallel disguise
scene early in 1 Henry IV, which likewise acts as a sub-plot version of
his central deception of others. The Gad’s Hill incident belongs to the
folk tradition of royalty concealing itself in the clothes of common man,
an image which had itself been used by Origen for the Incarnation in a
discussion of ‘guiler beguiled’ model of the Atonement.¹² Origen’s image
is drawn from a wider, and ubiquitous, metaphor for the Incarnation
which involves Christ ‘clothing’ himself in humanity.¹³ In each of Hal’s
plays he disguises himself with borrowed clothes: the suit of buckram
lent him by Poins in 1 Henry IV, the servant’s cap and apron in 2
¹⁰ Peter S. Donaldson, Machiavelli and the Mystery of State (Cambridge: Cambridge

¹¹ See Paula S. Berggren, ‘ ‘‘From a God to a Bull’’: Shakespeare’s Slumming Jove’,
Classical and Modern Literature 5/4 (1985): 277–91.
¹² Quoted in Gustaf Aulen, Christus Victor: An Historical Study of the Three Main
Types of the Idea of the Atonement, trans. A. G. Herbert (London: Society for Promoting
Christian Knowledge, 1931), 68.
¹³ See William Langland, The Vision of Piers Plowman: A Critical Edition of the B-Text
based Trinity College Cambridge MS B.15.17, ed. A. V. C. Schmidt (London: Everyman,
1995), passus 18. 22.
Henry IV, and Erpingham’s cloak which he wears on the night before
Agincourt in Henry V. These garments are objective correlatives of his
dissimulation, as is illustrated through the sartorial metaphor employed
by the Constable of France to describe Hal’s tavern life:
And you shall find his vanities forespent
Were but the outside of the Roman Brutus,
Covering discretion with a coat of folly.
(Henry V, 2. 4. 26–38)
Hal’s disguise of himself as a prodigal son is literalized in the clothes of
buckram that he puts on to fight Falstaff: ‘I have cases of buckram for
the nonce, to immask our noted outward garments’ (1. 2. 177–8).¹⁴
Hal’s comic subterfuge holds in miniature the masking of his nobility
which is the central plot of the play.
This deeper design is revealed twenty lines after the Gad’s Hill plot is
hatched:
Herein will I imitate the sun,
Who doth permit the base contagious clouds
To smother up his beauty from the world,
· · · · · · · ·
[so that] My reformation, glitt’ring o’er my fault,
Shall show more goodly, and attract more eyes
Than that which hath no foil to set it off.
(1. 2. 194–212)
Hal’s dissimulation at Gad’s Hill is in pursuit of the same goal as his
central deception: a combat with someone who does not comprehend
his true nature. The hidden royalty of Hal at Gad’s Hill reveals the most
important parallel between his later duel and the combat between Christ
and Satan. Christ, according to the myth, concealed his divinity, and
Hal conceals his royalty, that part of himself which could in Elizabethan
times be considered quasi-divine. The ancient analogy between divinity
and majesty was based on the parallel between twin-natured kingship—a
mortal man and an immortal office—and the two natures of the God-
man Christ: the king presents ‘on the terrestrial stage the living image of
the two-natured God’.¹⁵ Hal’s character—behaving as a commoner in
¹⁴ Buckram also has connections with disguise, and as an adjective could denote ‘a
false appearance of strength’: Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. buckram.
¹⁵ Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), 47.
both his borrowed robes and his tavern life—is an exploration of such
twin-natured kingship.¹⁶
Hal hides the fact that he is his father’s son in martial might and
kingliness under a cloak of dissipation. This disguise resonates with an
interpretation of the Atonement known as the ‘guiler beguiled’ theory,
in which Christ deliberately conceals his divine nature in order to deceive
the infernal powers. Gregory of Nyssa famously used the metaphor of a
worm for Christ’s human nature: a worm which concealed the ‘hook’
of his divinity and so tempted the devil to impale himself on it: ‘For
since … it was not in the nature of the opposing power to come in
contact with the undiluted presence of God … the Deity was hidden
under the veil of our nature, that so, as with a ravenous fish, the hook
of the Deity might be gulped down along with the bait of flesh.’¹⁷ Pope
Leo the Great likewise explained that when Christ hid ‘the power of
His Godhead which was inseparable from His manhood under the veil
of our weakness, the crafty foe was taken off his guard’.¹⁸ This divine
deception of the devil is a fundamental part of the abuse of power
model of the Atonement, in which the devil is deceived into thinking
that Jesus is just a man, and so he attempts to condemn him to hell.
However, because Jesus is sinless this is an abuse of his power (the devil
only has dominion over sinners) and because the devil has overreached
his jurisdiction, all his rights over mankind are revoked. It is essential
to God’s plan that Satan does not recognize Jesus as God, and therefore
he is disguised as a mere man.¹⁹
There are two plays in the mystery cycles which dramatize this
interpretation of the Atonement: the temptation in the desert and the
¹⁶ See Anne Barton, Essays, Mainly Shakespearean (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1994), 218.
¹⁷ Gregory of Nyssa, Dogmatic Treatises etc., in A Select Library of Nicene and Post-
Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, 2nd series (Oxford: Parker & Co., 1893), v. 494.
For the biblical sources of this image of the ‘divine angler’ see Pickering, Literature &
Art, 269. For a use of Gregory’s metaphor by Shakespeare’s contemporaries, see Thomas
Playfere, A Most Excellent and Heavenly Sermon: Vpon the 23. Chapter of the Gospell by
Saint Luke (London, 1595), C2r ; See also ch. 6 below.
¹⁸ Leo the Great, in A Select Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian
Church, 2nd series (Oxford: Parker & Co., 1893), xii. 131.
¹⁹ The deception inherent in this interpretation of the Incarnation was considered to
be justified because Satan had likewise tricked Adam and Eve into eating the apple. See
Alan H. Nelson, ‘The Temptation of Christ; or, The Temptation of Satan’, in Medieval
English Drama: Essays Critical and Contextual, ed. Jerome Taylor and Alan H. Nelson
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), 218–29; David L. Wee, ‘The Temptation
of Christ and the Motif of Divine Duplicity in the Corpus Christi Cycle Drama’, Modern
Philology 72 (1974): 1–16.
harrowing of hell. In the former Satan pries into Jesus’ nature trying to
fathom who he truly is, and in the latter, Christ finally casts aside his
disguise and reveals his divinity to the infernal powers as he shatters their
world. There are two people in Henry IV who are destroyed by their
inability to recognize that Hal is a true prince who only plays at being a
Cheapside rogue. The first is Hotspur. Hal’s project of self-redemption
involves masking of his royal identity and through this concealment he
engages his enemy in a single combat which the latter thinks he will
win. Hal’s revelation of his true nature as he destroys his adversary in
a knightly encounter is nuanced by the guiler beguiled explanation of
the Incarnation and his final defeat of Hotspur is cast as a harrowing.
The second person who is doomed by his lack of understanding of
Hal’s real nature is Falstaff. Falstaff, like the devil in the temptation in
the desert, shows his fundamental misconstruction of his companion’s
nature, although the audience, as in the mysteries, are always aware of
what Hal truly is.
The initial confrontation between Jesus and Satan in the wilderness
is re-enacted and memorialized in Lent: the time when 2 Henry IV is
set (2. 4. 346–51) and the season that governs 1 Henry IV. The tavern
scenes of Henry IV are coloured by the temptation in the desert: just
as Christ was tempted by Satan, Hal is tempted by the ‘reverend Vice’
Falstaff (2. 5. 458).²⁰ Such at least is the schema. But Hal is not really
tempted. He allows himself to be drawn into idleness, play-fighting
with his friends while his father prepares for war, but he had always
intended to throw off his loose behaviour when the time was propitious.
His apparent dissipation is a strategy rather than a weakness. This is
a staged Lenten period, not a genuine time of temptation and self-
searching, but in an inverted manner it contains the characteristics of
the season: fish, leanness, and repentance. Falstaff, both the diabolical
tempter in the desert and the carnival figure of Shrove Tuesday, carries
the preponderance of the Lenten imagery.²¹ The war of words between
Falstaff and the prince is a battle between fat and lean, a leitmotif of the
play:
²⁰ See J. Dover Wilson, The Fortunes of Falstaff (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1970), 17–23; Willard Farnham, ‘Falstaff and the Grotesque’, in Falstaff, ed.
Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1992), 166–8.
²¹ Francois Laroque, ‘Shakespeare’s Battle of Carnival and Lent: The Falstaff Scenes
Reconsidered (1 & 2 Henry IV)’, in Shakespeare and Carnival: After Bakhtin, ed. Ronald
Knowles (London: Macmillan, 1998), 83–96.
  I’ll be no longer guilty of this sin. This sanguine coward,
this bed-presser, this horse-back-breaker, this huge hill of flesh—
  ’Sblood, you starveling, you elf-skin, you dried neat’s tongue,
you bull’s pizzle, you stock-fish …
(2. 5. 245–9)
The skirmish of wit with Falstaff in the tavern is a prelude to the single
combat with Hotspur on the battlefield, and its dramatic function of
anticipation is similar to the narrative function of Christ’s temptation in
the wilderness: a verbal trial of strength that anticipates the main action of
the Passion. Contemporary sermons about the temptation in the desert
borrowed the martial language of the devil’s final destruction for this
preliminary tussle. Lancelot Andrewes, for example, in a sermon series
printed in 1592, described Christ and Satan as ‘the two Champions’
and the holy spirit as ‘the leader of Iesus into the lists’.²²
The terms of Falstaff and Hal’s argument are those of the battle
of Lent: the popular enactment of the financial rivalry between fish-
mongers and butchers during this season. Falstaff counters the Prince’s
meaty criticism—‘sanguine’, ‘horse’, ‘flesh’—with the piscine barb
‘stock-fish’ (and perhaps a particularly thin ‘ling’, a staple Lenten fish,
could have been heard in ‘starveling’).²³ Nashe’s Praise of the Red
Herring (1599), composed at a similar time to 1 Henry IV, makes
reference to this martial Lenten imagery in a literal battle of fish and
flesh, which narrates his support for the Yarmouth fishermen against
‘their bloudy adversaries, the butchers’.²⁴ Lenten Stuffe and Henry
IV may also share a submerged satire against the Cobham family.
In Nashe, Alice Scoufos argues, Oldcastle is parodied as the Lenten
fish par excellence, the herring.²⁵ In Shakespeare the Falstaff/Oldcastle
jibes have Lenten associations too, except here the ‘roasted Man-
ningtree ox with the pudding in his belly’ (2. 5. 457) is definitely
²² Lancelot Andrewes, The Wonderfvll Combate (for Gods glorie and Mans saluation)
betweene Christ and Satan (London, 1592), A3r . See also Robert Holland, The holie
history of our Lord Jesus Christs natiuitie, life, resurrection a. acsension: gathered into English
meeter (London, 1594), C2v .
²³ The Arden editor, through his emendation of ‘elf-skin’ to ‘eel-skin’ adds another
fish to the list: cf. King Henry IV part 1, ed. A. R. Humphreys, The Arden Shakespeare
(London: Routledge, 1960/96), 69. The emendation is strengthened by Falstaff ’s use of
the epithet ‘eel-skin’ in the following play: 2 Henry IV, 3. 2. 316.
²⁴ Works of Thomas Nashe, iii. 183, 201–4.
²⁵ Alice Lyle Scoufos, ‘Nashe, Jonson and the Oldcastle Problem’, Modern Philology
65 (1968): 249–53.
on the meaty side of the war.²⁶ The Puritan ancestry of Falstaff
(as Oldcastle) seems surprising, but Puritans were not always par-
odied as abstainers from the pleasures of the flesh. Kristen Poole
has argued convincingly that Shakespeare’s presentation of Falstaff is
entirely in keeping with the tenor of late sixteenth-century anti-Puritan
literature. She has shown how the anti-Marprelate tracts and the bur-
lesque stage performances of the Marprelate controversy created a
grotesque, fleshy Puritan who was one of the dramatic antecedents of
Falstaff.²⁷
Falstaff, like a Puritan, objects to the strictures of Lent. Protestants did
not observe Lent rigorously because it was based on the tradition of the
Church rather than Scriptural authority. Numerous sermons objected
to Lenten fasting, and Foxe frequently lists the eating of meat and dairy
products during Lent as a charge levelled against Protestant martyrs.
John Taylor’s Protestant satire Jack-a-Lent ends with the assertion: ‘I
am persuaded that a man may go to heaven as well with a leg of a capon,
as with a red herring.’²⁸ A capon leg is part of Falstaff’s avoidance of
the most solemn fast of Lent. Poins asks him: ‘how agrees the devil
and thee about thy soul, that thou soldest him on Good Friday last, for
a … cold capon’s leg?’ (1. 2. 113–15). The religious language highlights
the fact that this broken fast is not merely the act of a humorously
greedy clown, but also in keeping with the image of the grotesque
Puritan.
Falstaff ’s refusal to observe fasts is part of his original incarnation
as a Puritan martyr, but the motivation has been inverted. Falstaff
eats because he is greedy, not because he wants to defy the Catholic
Church. Likewise his constant Puritan idiom—such as calling himself
²⁶ For the evidence that Falstaff was once Oldcastle, see Gary Taylor, ‘The Fortunes
of Oldcastle’, Shakespeare Survey 38 (1985): 85–100.
²⁷ Kristen Poole, Radical Religion from Shakespeare to Milton: Figures of Nonconformity
in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 34. For
the influence of the Marprelate plays on the staging of Puritanism in general, and
Falstaff in particular, see Collinson, ‘Ecclesiastical vitriol’, 150–70; Hornback, ‘Staging
Puritanism’, 31–67; Grace Tiffany, ‘Puritanism in Comic History: Exposing Royalty in
the Henry Plays’, Shakespeare Studies 26 (1998): 256–87.
²⁸ Foxe, Actes and Monuments, ii. 1043; John Taylor, Jacke A Lent His Beginning and
Entertainment with the mad prankes of his Gentleman Vsher Shrove Tuesday that goes before
him, and his Footman hunger attending (1630), in The Old Book Collector’s Miscellany,
ed. Charles Hindley (London: Reeves & Turner, 1872), 22. The opposition between
herring and capons was so marked that by the late seventeenth century the joke had
become linguistically enshrined and a red herring was known as a ‘Yarmouth capon’:
Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. capon.
a ‘saint’ (1. 2. 91)—is used in the pursuit of vice rather than virtue. He
exhorts Poins in rousing Puritan rhetoric—‘God give thee the spirit of
persuasion and him the ears of profiting’ (1. 2. 150–1)—to persuade
Hal to commit a robbery, and in preparation for his impersonation of
the king in a tavern play says: ‘an the fire of grace be not quite out of
thee, now shalt thou be moved’ (2. 5. 386). The mismatching is very
funny, and Falstaff intends it to be so. He creates comedy by using high
moral language for a low moral purpose, and expects his audience to
laugh. Falstaff ’s language can be read as a parody of Puritanism, but
it is also something more engaging—the parodic Puritan’s hypocritical
inversion of biblical phraseology becomes innocent in Falstaff who does
not intend to be misunderstood.
Falstaff is not only a complex and alluring counterpart of Puritan
and Vice, he is also a father figure to the young prince. Psychoanalytic
critics have long argued that Falstaff is Hal’s ‘father-substitute’, but
as the battle approaches Hal withdraws from him to be alone with
his true father.²⁹ Hal’s apparent capitulation to his father’s will prior
to the battle in 1 Henry IV (the position of the reconciliation is
Shakespeare’s invention: in the sources it does not happen until after
the rebellion has been crushed) has subtle links with Gethsemane, a
reference which Shakespeare will make much more pronounced in
Henry’s withdrawal to pray before Agincourt.³⁰ Here the reference
functions as an image of perfect filial submission which resonates with
the scene. Hal’s emphatic ‘I am your son’ (3. 2. 134) arrogates to
himself the proud kinship of Gethsemane rather than the humility of
the prodigal who tells his father: ‘I am no more worthie to by called
thy sonne.’³¹ This is the moment when Hal declares his allegiance to
his real father rather than his father-figure, and his proud statement
of kinship with Bolingbroke marks his rejection of Falstaff and his
world.
Hal’s filial obedience is the more striking because in Shakespeare’s
source play The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth the reconciliation
between the king and his son opens with a genuine threat of danger to
²⁹ J. I. M. Stewart, Character and Motive in Shakespeare: Some Recent Appraisals

Examined (London: Longman, Green, 1949), 138; James L. Calderwood, Metadrama in
Shakespeare’s Henriad: Richard II to Henry V (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1979), 44.
³⁰ See below.
³¹ Luke 15: 19. For the underlying prodigal son narrative of I and 2 Henry IV, see
Young, English Prodigal Son Plays, 194–225; Beck, ‘Terence Improved’, 107–22.
Henry IV: ‘enters the Prince with a dagger in his hand’.³² Shakespeare has
inverted this, and in his play it is the shedding of the son’s blood, not
that of the father’s, which is intimated during the scene of reconciliation:
I will redeem all this on Percy’s head,
And in the closing of some glorious day
Be bold to tell you that I am your son;
When I will wear a garment all of blood,
And stain my favours in a bloody mask,
Which, washed away, shall scour my shame with it.
(3. 2. 132–7)
Hal’s conflation of blood with cleansing borrows a ubiquitous image

from the doctrine of the Atonement which is expressed, for example,
in the Prayer Book’s prayer of humble access: ‘that our sinfull bodies
may bee made cleane by his body, and our souls washed through his
most precious blood’.³³ The dominant biblical image of Hal’s speech,
however, comes from Isaiah 63 (parallels are italicized):
Who is this that cometh from Edom, with red garments from Bozrah? hee is
glorious in his apparell … Wherefore is thine apparell red, and thy garments like
him that treadeth in the winepresse? I haue troden the winepresse alone, and of
all people there was none with mee: for I will treade them in mine anger, and
treade them underfoote in my wrath, and their blood shal be sprinckled upon my
garments, and I will staine all my rayment. For the day of uengeance is in my
heart, & the yeere of my redeemed is come.³⁴
One interpretation of Christ’s fulfilment of Isaiah 63 was the Anselmian
view that only God himself, in the person of Christ, was capable of
making a complete satisfaction for the infinite offence of sin. In the new
dispensation therefore, the person who comes from Edom has borne the
wrath of God, and his clothes are stained with his own blood instead
of the blood of his enemies. The Book of Revelation, for example,
describes Christ’s fulfilment of Isaiah 63 thus: ‘and he was clothed with
a garment dipt in blood, & his name is called     … for
hee it is that treadeth the winepresse of the fiercenesse and wrath of
³² Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources, iv. 315. Psychoanalytic critics explain
the lack of this undercurrent in Shakespeare’s play by arguing that Hal’s ‘parricidal
impulses’ find their outlet in his treatment of Falstaff and in the rebellion of his alter ego,
Hotspur: Stewart, Character and Motive, 137–8; Ernst Kris, Psychoanalytic Explorations
in Art (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1953), 278.
³³ Booke of Common Prayer, N2v .
³⁴ Isa. 63: 1–4. See Shaheen, Biblical References in Shakespeare’s Plays, 418.
almightie God’ (19: 13–15).³⁵ The New Testament transforms the
aggressive triumph of God in Isaiah into the Passion of the suffering,
blood-soaked redeemer; and the two interpretations become one in the
cross that is both God’s humiliation and his glory.
Isaiah 63 was seen as a messianic prophecy both of Christ’s suffering
on the cross and of his final victory after the harrowing of hell. As
Lancelot Andrewes preached, using this as his text on Easter day, 1623:
‘his coming heer from Edom, will fall out to be His rising from the dead.
His returne from Bozra nothing but his vanquishing of hell’.³⁶ In this
interpretation of Isaiah the risen Christ retains the blood-soaked clothes,
the badge of his Crucifixion, when he comes in glory. The suffering is
remembered at the moment of triumph because it is through suffering
that Christ has triumphed. In the Chester Ascension the Tailors clothe
Christ in his blood-stained robes and the angels greet the ascending
redeemer with the cry of Isaiah:
Who ys this that cometh within the
blysse of heaven that neuer shall blynne,
bloodye, owt of the world of synne—
and harrowed hell hath hee?³⁷
In Hal’s reworking of Isaiah he will ‘wear a garment all of blood’ and
answer the question ‘who is this?’ with a triumphal ‘I am your son.’ Hal,
like the authors of Revelation and the mystery plays, recalls Isaiah 63 as
he looks forward to the time when a battle has been won and father and
son will be reunited.
The visualization of the guiler beguiled model of the Atonement
involved conceiving of the climax of salvation as a battle. In most medi-
eval Passion lyrics Christ is conceived as a victorious knight— Christus
victor —who encounters the devil on the cross and in his hellish cit-
adel.³⁸ The latter imagery is known as the harrowing of hell, an idea
which originated in the apocryphal Gospel of Nicodemus. This immensely
popular text may itself have been known to Shakespeare’s audience, as it
was printed in England at least eight times during the sixteenth century.
³⁵ Isaiah 63 was also connected to Christ’s sacrifice in the Prayer Book. It was
read as the epistle for the Monday before Easter: Booke of Common prayer, E5r . For
contemporary examples of a typological reading of Isaiah 63 see John Andrewes, Christ his
Crosse […] (Oxford, 1614), 9; Joseph Hall, The Passion Sermon, preache at Paul’s-Crosse,
on Good-Friday, April 14, 1609 (Birmingham, 1784), 19.
³⁶ Andrewes, XCVI Sermons, 567. ³⁷ Chester Mystery Cycle, 20. 105–8.
³⁸ For examples see Douglas Gray, ed., English Medieval Religious Lyrics (Exeter:
Exeter University Press, 1992), 16–37.
A recent commentator on a manuscript version of it, copied in the late
sixteenth century, suggests that it ‘retained a deep-rooted fascination
which even the Reformation could not destroy’.³⁹ The martial imagery
of salvation outlived the Reformation not only through the continued
popularity of old texts such as The Gospel of Nicodemus and Piers Plow-
man (the latter of which was enthusiastically championed and printed
by Protestant dissenters throughout the Tudor period) but also in the
rhetoric of Protestants themselves.⁴⁰
The harrowing of hell, a non-biblical episode in which Christ enters
limbo after his Crucifixion, defeats Satan, and rescues the souls of the
dead, is a way of visualizing the guiler beguiled model of the Atonement.
In Piers Plowman, Jesus explains to the devil as he enters hell, how:
‘I in liknesse of a leode, that Lord am of hevene, | Graciousliche thi
gile have quyt—go gile ayein gile!’ (passus 18. 357–8). In medieval
liturgy versions of the harrowing highlighted this deception of Satan
through his incomprehension at what is happening. The tollite portas,
the triumphal end of Psalm 24, became associated with the harrowing
of hell early in medieval liturgy and its emphasis on the interrogation
of identity—‘Who is this King of glory?’—chimed with the guiler
beguiled theory.⁴¹ The tollite portas also stresses that the Lord who
comes is ‘the Lord mightie in battell’ and the martial imagery of
salvation, and of the harrowing, survived into the post-Reformation
period. The harrowing retained its martial character in the Elizabethan
church, which commemorated the event daily in the recitation of the
Apostles’ Creed at morning and evening prayer. The homilies taught
that Christ: ‘passed through death & hell … He destroyed the devill and
all his tyranny, and openly triumphed over him, and tooke away from
³⁹ C. W. Marx, ‘The Gospel of Nicodemus in Old English and Middle English’, in

The Medieval Gospel of Nicodemus: Texts, Intertexts, and Contexts in Western Europe, ed.
Zbigniew Izydorczyk (Tempe: Arizona State University, 1997), 259.
⁴⁰ For the continued popularity of Piers Plowman, see Barbara A. Johnson, Reading
Piers Plowman and The Pilgrim’s Progress: Reception and the Protestant Reader (Car-
bondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1992), 99; David Norbrook, Poetry and
Politics in the English Renaissance, 2nd edn. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002),
36–7.
⁴¹ ‘Lift up your heads, yee gates, and be yee lift up yee euerlasting doores, and the
King of glory shal come in. Who is this King of glory? the Lord, strong and mightie, euen
the Lord mightie in battell’: Karl Young, The Drama of the Medieval Church (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1962), i. 149–50. For liturgical versions of the harrowing,
see ibid. i. 102–4, 167; Karl Young, ‘The Harrowing of Hell in Liturgical Drama’,
Transactions of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters 16/2 (1909): 910;
Chambers, Mediaeval Stage, ii. 4–5.
him all his captives’.⁴² John Foxe, likewise, in Christ Jesus Triumphant
(1579) calls Christ ‘our heauenly Champion’ and the verso of the
title page carries a full-page picture of Christ rising out of the tomb,
trampling on death and carrying a victor’s palm.⁴³
This pictorial representation of the harrowing is interesting as it seems
that this was a doctrine which was strongly tied to visual representation.
Luther’s Torgau sermon of 1533, the seminal text on the harrowing
for Lutherans, encourages a physical apprehension of the doctrine while
sidestepping the physical reality of the harrowing itself:
The customary way of depicting how Christ descended into hell on church
walls represents him with a cape and with banners in his hand as he makes his
descent and stalks and assaults the devil, as he storms hell and rescues his own
people from it. The children’s play presented at Easter depicts it in a similar
way. It seems better to me that you depict, act out, sing and recite the story in a
very simple way and let it remain at that and not concern yourself with sublime
and precise ideas about how it actually took place.⁴⁴
In England too, visual representations of the harrowing remained in

churches—the number of wall paintings of the subject which still
survive illustrate its popularity.⁴⁵ Glass representations in particular,
such as the fifteenth-century stained glass harrowing in St Michael’s,
Coventry or the ‘discending into Hell’ in the magnificent windows of
Malvern Priory, frequently survived into the late sixteenth and early
seventeenth centuries.⁴⁶ The testimony of John Bale, accused of denying
⁴² Certaine Sermons or Homilies, 192. The importance of the doctrine in the Eliza-
bethan church is also shown by its being the third of the thirty-nine Articles: Articles
whereupon it was agreed by the Archbyshops and Bishops of both provinces and the whole
cleargie, in the Convocation holden at London in the yere of our Lorde God 1562 accordyng
to the computation of the Churche of Englande, for the auoydyng of the diuersities of opynyons,
and for the stablishyng of consent touching true religion (London, 1571), A2v .
⁴³ John Foxe, Christ Iesvs Triumphant (London: John Day, 1579), Br .
⁴⁴ For a translation of this sermon, see Robert Kolb and James A. Nestingen, eds.,
Sources and Contexts of The Book of Concord (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2001), 246.
⁴⁵ C. E. Keyser, A List of Buildings in Great Britain and Ireland having Mural and
other Painted Decorations, of Dates Prior to the Latter part of the Sixteenth Century, 3rd
edn. (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1883), 10, 60, 126, 154, 158, 236, 279, 285. For
surviving representations of the harrowing in Shakespeare’s home county, see Davidson,
Early Art of Coventry, 32, 131–2.
⁴⁶ Thomas Habington, A Survey of Worcestershire by Thomas Habington, ed. John
Amphlett (Oxford: Worcestershire Historical Society, 1893–95), ii. 177. For the survival
of stained glass in Elizabethan England, see Tudor Royal Proclamations, ii. 147; William
Harrison, Harrison’s Description of England in Shakespere’s Youth, ed. Frederick J. Furnivall
(London: New Shakespere Society, 1877), i. 31; Trevor Cooper, ed., The Journal of
this article of the creed in 1536, describes the ways in which people
visualized the doctrine in the early Reformation period:
I neuer denyed, descendit ad inferna [but I told people] to be very cyrcumspect
in receyuyng the seyd artycle. And not to beleue yt as yei se yt sett forth in
peynted clothes, or in glasses wyndowes, or lyke as my self had befor tyme sett
yt forth in ye cuntre yer in a serten playe. for thowgh ye sowle of crist soch tyme
as hys corse laye in ye graue, ded vysytt hell, yet can we not iustlye suppose yt
he fawgt vyolentlye with ye deuyls, for ye sowles of ye faythfull sort, and so toke
them owte of yer possessyon.⁴⁷
Bale’s testimony illustrates how people were acquainted with the har-
rowing through pictorial and ludic representations of it, and expresses
his own distrust of such images.
Alexander Hume, one of those who took part in the 1590s debate
over the doctrine, mocks the belief in the literal harrowing of hell
through the reappearance of Foxe’s picture (mentioned above) on Hill’s
Defence of the Article: Christ descended into Hell (1592): ‘This picture
M. Doctor tooke to be so sure an argument of Christs descending into
hell … [that he] set it before his owne booke likewise.’⁴⁸ A literalist belief
in the descent was questioned by Calvin, who interpreted the Creed
as referring to Christ suffering hell’s pains on the cross, not an actual
descent into hell. Calvin’s interpretation was widely accepted in Puritan
circles by the 1580s and 1590s, and provoked a heated debate over
the doctrine, in which writers in the mainstream Church of England
defended the doctrine against the onslaught of Martin Marprelate and
other Puritans.⁴⁹ Martial language and imagery, however, was retained
by both sides of the debate. Thomas Bilson, the Bishop of Winchester,
William Dowsing: Iconoclasm in East Anglia during the Civil War (Woodbridge: Boydell,
2001), 89–106, 232, 260, 295, 302.
⁴⁷ Honor McCusker, John Bale: Dramatist and Antiquary (Bryn Mawr, Pa., 1942), 7.
⁴⁸ Alexander Hume, A reioynder to doctor Hil concerning the descente of Christ into Hell
[…] (Edinburgh, 1594), Z4r . The picture is John Day’s device and McKerrow suggests
that it may have been invented for Foxe’s book: Ronald B. McKerrow, Printers’ &
Publishers’ Devices in England & Scotland 1485–1640 (London: Bibliographical Society,
1913), 78–9, fig. 208.
⁴⁹ See John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeill, trans.
Ford Lewis Battles, The Library of Christian Classics (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1960),
xx. 512 ff.; Dewey D. Wallace, ‘Puritan and Anglican: The Interpretation of Christ’s
Descent into Hell in Elizabethan Theology’, Archiv für Reformations-Geschichte, 69
(1978): 248–87; The Marprelate Tracts 1588, 1589, ed. William Pierce (London: James
Clarke, 1911), 56, 186, 271–2, 280; Adam Hill, The Defence of the Article: Christ
descended into Hell (London, 1592); Hume, A reioynder to doctor Hil.
preached a sermon supporting the doctrine at Paul’s Cross during Lent,
1597 (a possible dating for the composition of 1 Henry IV ) which
argued that Christ ‘personallie conquered and disarmed’ the devil.⁵⁰
Calvin, likewise, in describing the metaphorical descent to hell on the
cross, writes that Christ: ‘must also grapple hand to hand with the
armies of hell’.⁵¹
This martial imagery of the harrowing is likewise present in non-
theological literature of the 1590s. Spenser’s Easter sonnet, Amoretti
68, begins:
Most glorious Lord of life! that, on this day,
Didst make Thy triumph over death and sin;
And, having harrowed hell, didst bring away
Captivity thence captive, us to win.
Spenser uses a biblical image of a victorious general enslaving death and

leading it in triumph. The allusion involves a numerological pun as it is
Psalm 68 (the same number as the sonnet) from which the quotation
‘thou hast led captiuitie captiue’ (68: 18) comes.⁵² Spenser uses martial
harrowing imagery repeatedly in The Faerie Queene when Arthur breaks
into the plot to save beleaguered knights. The allegorical colouring is
clearest in Book 1, canto 8. In this battle between Arthur and Duessa’s
forces over the Redcross knight, Spenser alludes to the veiled Godhead
of Christ. The connection with the harrowing is shown through details
such as the fast-shut gates that open miraculously at Arthur’s bidding,
and the fact that the dungeon in which Redcross languishes is ‘as
darke as hell’.⁵³ Less generally recognized, but as important a parallel,
is the fact that the inmates of the castle are ignorant of who Arthur is
because his shield is covered. Ostensibly the covered shield means that
Arthur’s enemies are unable to read his heraldry and find out who he is;
allegorically it finds a parallel in the demons who do not comprehend
⁵⁰ Thomas Bilson, The effect of certaine Sermons tovching The Fvll redemption of
mankind by the death and bloud of Christ Jesvs […] (London, 1599), A4r .
⁵¹ Calvin, Institutes, xx. 515.
⁵² Kenneth J. Larsen’s excellent edition, which shows how the sonnets correspond
with the daily order of scriptural readings in the Church of England, references the Psalm
but does not draw attention to the pun: Edmund Spenser’s Amoretti and Epithalamion: A
Critical Edition, ed. Kenneth J. Larsen (Tempe, Ariz.: Medieval and Renaissance Texts
and Studies, 1997), 95, 201.
⁵³ Faerie Queene, I. viii. 3, I. viii. 5, I. viii. 39. See also Matthew A. Fike, ‘Prince
Arthur and Christ’s Descent into Hell: The Faerie Queene, I. viii and II. viii’, ANQ: A
Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes, and Reviews 7/2 (1997): 6–13.
Christ’s divine nature while it is shrouded by his humanity. During the
battle the veil is dislodged, and his enemies are blinded and vanquished,
as are the devils in the harrowing when Christ comes in the full glory of
his divinity. Spenser underlines the allusion by adding that the shield’s
dazzling light could only be compared to divine brightness ‘as where
th’Almighties lightning brond does light | It dimmes the dazed eyen,
and daunts the senses quight’ (I. viii. 21).
In the climactic battle of 1 Henry IV Hal is likewise using traditional
Christian imagery when he connects the bloody victory of Isaiah 63 with
a martial conquest: ‘I will redeem all this on Percy’s head, | … When I
will wear a garment all of blood’ (3. 2. 132–5). Throughout Lancelot
Andrewes’ sermon on Isaiah 63 the suffering and the triumph of the
redeemer are entwined: his blood-soaked garments are also the scarlet
colours of the victorious captain who has stormed the capital of his
enemy. The harrowing of hell is central to Andrewes’s interpretation: the
figure who comes from Edom returns triumphant from his encounter
with Satan: ‘this Party, whosoeuer He is, hath gotten the upper hand,
wonn the field; marches stately, Conqueror-like. His, the day sure’. Christ
has vanquished ‘even to Bozra, to hell it selfe, and there brake the gates
of brasse, and made the iron-barrs flie in sunder’.⁵⁴
Hal’s martial encounter with Hotspur, like the Harrowing play of
the mystery cycles, is the climax of the dramatic action.⁵⁵ Hotspur, as a
rebel, is automatically linked in royalist Tudor rhetoric to the first rebel,
Lucifer. The Homilie Against Disobedience and Wilfull Rebellion—which
was read at least once a year in every church—makes a striking
comparison between rebels and the devil:
Where most rebellions and rebelles bee, there is the expresse similitude of hell,
and the rebelles themselves are the verie figures of fiendes and devils, and their
captaine the vngratious patterne of Lucifer and Satan, the prince of darkenesse,
of whose rebellion as they bee followers, so shall they of his damnation in hell
vndoubtedly bee partakers.⁵⁶
This connection between a rebel leader and the devil is particularly
pertinent as there is strong evidence that Shakespeare drew on this
⁵⁴ Andrewes, XCVI Sermons, 570, 573. For the importance of hell’s gates flying
asunder in the harrowing narratives see Ps. 24; Calvin, Institutes, xx. 514; Kolve, Play
Called Corpus Christi, 195.
⁵⁵ For the climactic situating of the Harrowing play in the York and Chester cycles,
see Happé, Cyclic Form, 232–5, 243.
⁵⁶ Certaine Sermons or Homilies, 296–7.
homily when writing his second tetralogy.⁵⁷ It is noticeable that Falstaff,
who parodies the dominant idiom through imitation, describes the rebel
camp in satanic terms: ‘that fiend Douglas, that spirit Percy, and that
devil Glyndŵr’ (2. 5. 371–2).
Hotspur is also linked with Lucifer in his unwillingness to give up
his captives. When the king demands them he impetuously declares ‘I’ll
keep them all’ (1. 3. 211). A desire to keep his prisoners is a strong part
of the characterization of the devil, both in Piers Plowman and in the
mystery plays. When Satan, in the Chester play, suddenly realizes that
he is not strong enough to fight Christ, he cries out:
Owt, alas, I am shente!
My might fayles, veramente.
This prynce that ys nowe present
Will pull from me my praye.⁵⁸
The freeing of souls is a crucial event in the iconography of the

harrowing, and most depictions of it focus on this event. Hal’s first act
after his victory, in his final speech of the play, is to free a prisoner:
‘go to the Douglas and deliver him | Up to his pleasure, ransomless and
free’ (5. 5. 28–9).⁵⁹ Hal’s final action of this play could be an attempt
to imitate the largesse inherent in Christ’s deliverance of mankind,
the action that ends the Harrowing of Hell plays, but Hal’s chivalrous
behaviour is crucially different from Christ’s salvation of all virtuous
captive souls. Not only has the number of freed men become severely
curtailed, but Douglas was his prisoner, not Hotspur’s.⁶⁰
⁵⁷ Alfred Hart, Shakespeare and the Homilies: And Other Pieces of Research into the
Elizabethan Drama (London: Oxford University Press, 1934), 38–61.
⁵⁸ Chester Mystery Cycle, 17. 177–80. See also Langland, Piers Plowman, passus
18. 276–351. It is praise, not ‘praye’, that Hotspur has kept from Hal, but he dies
regretting it as much as Satan does his souls: ‘O Harry, thou hast robbed me of my
youth. | I better brook the loss of brittle life | Than those proud titles thou hast won of
me’ (5. 4. 76–8).
⁵⁹ Cf. the liberation of the patriarchs in York Plays, 37. 349–96. See also Schiller,
Iconography, ii. figs. 12, 15, 22, 379, 476, 539, 767.
⁶⁰ There is another connection between both Hotspur and Falstaff and medieval,
theatrical devils. Hotspur’s ignominious exit from the stage carried by Falstaff—‘He
takes up Hotspur on his back’ (5. 4. 127)—recalls the removal of the dead Vice from the
stage by the devil in earlier drama: cf. Alan C. Dessen, ‘The Intemperate Knight and
the Politic Prince: Late Morality Structure in Henry IV part I ’, Shakespeare Studies 7
(1974): 167; Alan C. Dessen, Shakespeare and the Late Moral Plays (Lincoln: University
of Nebraska Press, 1986), 87–8. This connection links both Hotspur and Falstaff with
early stage representations of evil, although it reverses the roles. Jonson’s The Devil is an
Ass ends with a very similar stage direction: ‘Iniquity takes him [the devil] on his back’
Shakespeare makes Hotspur a noble rather than a devilish figure
although, like the devil, he is fighting for a mistaken and doomed cause.
Hotspur shares with medieval and early modern dramatizations of evil
what might be termed a wrong-headed attractiveness. The devil and the
Vice were often the most popular theatrical figures and a rapport with
the audience was an essential part of their characterization. Hotspur’s
alignment with stage devils does not make him satanic, but it does
support the royal attempt to discredit his cause. The most fundamental
connection between Hotspur and medieval characterizations of the devil
is that they both belong to an outmoded world order. Satan is part of
the old dispensation. He clings to the idea that Christ will not be able
to take his prey because he is bound to fight according to the old law of
justice. In Piers Plowman Lucifer declares:
If he reve me of my right, he robbeth me by maistrie;

For by right and by reson the renkes that ben here
Body and soule beth myne, bothe goode and ille.
For hymself seide, that sire is of hevene,
That if Adam ete the appul, alle sholde deye,
· · · · · · · · ·
And sithen he that Soothnesse is seide thise wordes,
· · · · · · · · ·
I leeve that lawe nyl noght lete hym the leeste.
( passus 18. 276–84)⁶¹
Hotspur likewise fights according to old rules, in his case outmoded

models of chivalry and honour. When the king’s servant approaches
him on the battlefield and demands he give over his prisoners to the
king, Hotspur refuses. The king is incensed:
What think you, coz,

Of this young Percy’s pride? The prisoners
Which he in this adventure hath surprised
To his own use he keeps, and sends me word
I shall have none but Mordake Earl of Fife. (1. 1. 90–4)
and the Vice declares: ‘The Diuell was wont to carry away the euill; | But, now, the Euill
out-carries the Diuell’: Ben Jonson, vi. 5. 6. 76–7.
⁶¹ What the devil does not understand is that through the paradox of the Incarnation,
man has been able to make satisfaction for man: ‘al that man hath mysdo, I man, wole
amende it’ ( passus 18. 343 ff.).
But in fact according to the law of arms Hotspur is entitled to retain all
the prisoners, except for the Earl of Fife who has royal blood.⁶² They are
his by right, according to the old system. In common with other similar
characters who Shakespeare portrays as relics within their own cultures,
such as Antony and Hector, Hotspur is sympathetic and the values he
stands for are not cast aside. However, unlike Antony and Hector’s
adversaries (Caesar and Achilles) who refuse to fight them in single
combat—a method of fighting that represents everything these figures
of the heroic past stand for—Hal meets and overcomes Hotspur on the
latter’s own terms.⁶³ Hal speaks to the drawer in his own language and
beats Hotspur according to his own rules.
Hal casts himself as a victorious Christlike captain in his allusion to
Isaiah 63 before the battle, and this role is likewise recognized by some
of his adversaries. Vernon is struck by the sight of him and reports
what he has seen to Hotspur in language that glisters with light and the
rhetoric of deification. Vernon describes seeing Hal and his comrades:
Glittering in golden coats like images,

As full of spirit as the month of May,
And gorgeous as the sun at midsummer,
· · · · · · ·
I saw young Harry with his beaver on,
His cuishes on his thighs, gallantly armed,
Rise from the ground like feathered Mercury,
And vaulted with such ease into his seat
As if an angel dropped down from the clouds
To turn and wind a fiery Pegasus. (4. 1. 101–10)
Christ in the Harrowing of Hell play would have been similarly bright,
dressed in white and gold, and possibly also attired as a knight.⁶⁴ The
bright clothes in the staging of the mystery plays were a symbol for the
light which at Christ’s approach broke in upon hell and threw it into
confusion. At this point in most of the harrowing narratives the other
⁶² King Henry IV part 1, ed. Humphreys, note to 1. 1. 91–4.

⁶³ Cf. Troilus and Cressida 5. 9. 9–14, and Antony and Cleopatra 3. 13. 24–30,
4. 1. 1–6.
⁶⁴ Peter Stuart Macaulay, ‘The Play of the Harrowing of hell as a Climax in the
English Mystery Cycles’, Studia Germanica Gandensia 8 (1966): 129. For the bright
apparel of Christ in the French Harrowing play at Mons, see Meredith, Staging of
Religious Drama, 113. For the possible religious reference of ‘like images’ see M. St. Clare
Byrne, ‘Like Images’, Times Literary Supplement 2313 (1946): 259.
devils recognize that the light is a sign of Christ’s divinity and scatter in
despair. Satan, however, like Hotspur in this scene, remains sceptical.
In the mystery plays Satan is the last to realize that a superior
adversary has entered hell. The Towneley play has a particularly strong
dramatization of this as first Rybald, and then Belzabub, realize the
truth and flee, while Satan remains arrogantly self-assured until he is
beaten. In the York play likewise Satan does not understand how the
man he has killed can come to hell not as a captive but calling himself
king. He demands to know more from those who are better informed:
‘what page is there that makes prees, | And callis hym kyng of vs in fere?’
(37. 125–6). David replies:
He is a kyng of vertues clere,
A lorde mekill of myght
And stronge in ilke a stoure,
In batailes ferse to fight. (37. 128–31)⁶⁵
In the York and Towneley plays Satan does not think his challenger is
worthy of him. He brushes David’s commendation aside and accuses
his adversary of having led a wild and foolish life:
Nay, faitour, ther-of schall he faile,
For alle his fare I hym deffie,
I knowe his trantis fro toppe to taile,
He levys with gaudis and with gilery.⁶⁶
Hotspur, likewise, is incredulous about this new, reformed Hal and

surprised by his princely challenge to single combat. He likewise
questions those who have superior knowledge of his adversary:
 The Prince of Wales stepped forth before the King
And, nephew, challenged you to single fight …
· · · · · · · · · ·
 Tell me, tell me,
How showed his tasking? Seem’d it in contempt?
 No, by my soul, I never in my life
Did hear a challenge urg’d more modestly
· · · · · · · · · ·
 Cousin, I think thou art enamourèd
⁶⁵ See the similar exchange in Towneley Plays 25. 121–40.

⁶⁶ York Plays, 37. 157–60. Cf. Towneley Plays, 25. 165–8. ‘Trantis’, ‘gaudis’, and
‘gilery’ are deceitful tricks, cheats, and games: Middle English Dictionary, s.v. Trant,
Gaud, and gileri.
On his follies. Never did I hear
Of any prince so wild a liberty.
(5. 2. 45–71)
Vernon and Worcester have understood Hal’s true nobility at this
point, while the leader of the rebellion is still ignorant of it.⁶⁷ Hotspur’s
questions, his incredulity, and his belief in Hal’s foolish wildness follow
the pattern of the mystery plays. Hotspur, like Satan, is blind to his
adversary’s true nature and does not know his strength. Hotspur still
thinks of Hal as the Cheapside rogue, calls him ‘the nimble-footed
madcap Prince of Wales’ (4. 1. 95). Hotspur is cozened by his guise as
an ordinary young man (as the devil was by the Incarnation); he has
been duped into understanding only one side of Hal’s nature. Hotspur’s
own forthright character is unable to grasp Hal’s strategy of deception
and he remains ignorant that beneath Hal’s feckless exterior lies a true
prince, until the moment that Hal destroys him.
This central confusion about Hal’s identity is highlighted by
Shakespeare in the proliferation of royal figures on the battlefield:
‘the king has many marching in his coats’ (5. 3. 25). At Shrewsbury
there is a general bewilderment about who people truly are, which is
illustrated most clearly by the killing of Blunt while dressed as the King
(5. 3. 1–28). When Hotspur finally faces Hal, he seems likewise slightly
unsure about whether he has indeed found the prince:
 If I mistake not, thou art Harry Monmouth.
  Thou speak’st as if I would deny my name.
 My name is Harry Percy
· · · · · · · · · ·
  I am the Prince of Wales.
(5. 4. 58–62)
Even Falstaff fails to recognize Hal during the battle and asks: ‘but who
comes here?’ (5. 3. 39). The questioning of the champion’s identity
is central to Old Testament prophecies of the harrowing (Isaiah 63
and Psalm 24) and Hotspur’s confusion and Falstaff’s words recall the
⁶⁷ This scenic form in which a combatant’s power is underestimated by his adversary,

although recognized by that adversary’s companions, is also shared (in the York and
Towneley cycles) by the Pharaoh play. For the interpretation of the Moses story as a type
of the harrowing see Rosemary Woolf, The English Mystery Play (London: Routledge &
Kegan Paul, 1972), 153–4. Woolf ’s interpretation, which proves the centrality of the
structure analysed here to the dramaturgy of the cycles, has been accepted by all modern
editors of these plays. My grateful thanks to Santha Bhattacharji for alerting me to this.
question—‘who is this that cometh?’—asked by the demonic forces
at the harrowing and by the angels when Christ ascends in glory. In
the Piers Plowman harrowing Langland retains the Latin (which in
this text is a sign of scriptural or liturgical quotation): ‘Quis est iste?’
The Chester playwright translates and embellishes the passage, but the
allusion to Isaiah is still clear: ‘who ys he so styffe and stronge | that so
maysterlyke comes us amonge?’⁶⁸ The devil does not recognize Christ’s
divine nature, just as Hotspur does not realise Hal’s kingliness: both
have been duped into believing their adversary is an ordinary man.
Hal has constructed a pattern in which, after his Lenten period in
the wilderness, he will return, overcome the opposing forces, regain
his father’s favour and ascend the throne as England’s glorious new
hope. After he has thrown off his disguise as a dissolute youth at
Shrewsbury, and defeated Hotspur, he is ready to rise again to the
new life of a courtly prince and heir apparent. However, at just the
moment that Hal brings to fruition the actions that were to bring about
his own carefully orchestrated resurrection, Falstaff pre-empts him: ‘Sir
John rises up’ (5. 4. 109).⁶⁹ Falstaff’s resuscitation is a perfectly timed
parody and postpones Hal’s rebirth because it destabilizes the imagery
that he has so carefully created. Throughout the play Falstaff ’s actions
and speeches comment through comparison. Hal’s redemptive scheme
cannot withstand the ironic force of Falstaff’s rising from a feigned
death, and unchivalric wounding of Hotspur in the (euphemistic)
thigh. Falstaff jumps up and Hal’s Christlike stance collapses under the
pressure. This is perhaps why he allows Falstaff’s claim that he has killed
Percy himself. The design has gone awry and before Hal can become
the victorious king of Henry V he must wait through another play. The
second part of Henry IV shares with the earlier play its Lenten imagery,
the early comic sub-plot parody of the Incarnation, and the climactic
battle, but this time Hal will not allow Falstaff to steal his thunder.
Hal’s ‘resurrection’, his ascent to glory and to the throne, is therefore
deferred until Henry V and it is only in the final play of the tetralogy that
he becomes ‘the mirror of all Christian Kings’, who scatters ‘a largess
⁶⁸ Piers Plowman, xviii. 316; Chester Mystery Cycle, 17. 121–2. See also Andrewes,
XCVI Sermons, 567–8.
⁶⁹ It has been suggested that this is a burlesque of the real Oldcastle who reputedly
predicted he would ‘rise to life again, the third day’: Taylor, ‘The Fortunes of Oldcastle’,
95. The evidently messianic overtones of this prediction strengthen the reading of
Falstaff ’s rising as a parodic resurrection. For another example of Falstaff ’s pre-emptive
parody, see Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations, 54–5.
universal like the sun’ (2. 0. 6, 4. 0. 43). There are inconsistencies,
however, in the image of Henry as a perfect ruler even as he appears
to have achieved the godlike status he had always aspired to.⁷⁰ As in
1 Henry IV the religious allusions create an apparent parallel between
Shakespearean staging and the rhetoric of Tudor monarchist propa-
ganda. Henry V is a highly successful monarch, and his manipulation of
religiously nuanced language and actions is a masterly reprise of Richard
II’s inept messianic self-portrayal. Hal has reinvested monarchy with
the appearance of divinity and at one level strengthens the safety of the
crown and realm through his success. But, as with his friendship with
Falstaff, political necessity involves the prince in hypocrisy. The divine
analogy is an artifice created by Hal for his own ends in order that he
may redeem himself in the eyes of his father and the country and the
salvation which the Christic imagery promises, in both 1 Henry IV and
Henry V, is primarily self-reflexive.
The structure of Henry V engages with the audience’s knowledge of
1 Henry IV. The Dauphin is set up as an inferior version of Hotspur,
and is equally, and as mistakenly, sceptical about Henry:
 For, good my liege, she is so idly kinged,
Her sceptre so fantastically borne
By a vain, giddy, shallow, humorous youth,
That fear attends her not.
 Oh peace, Prince Dauphin.
You are too much mistaken in this king.
Question your grace the late ambassadors
· · · · · · · ·
And you shall find his vanities forespent
Were but the outside of the Roman Brutus,
Covering discretion with a coat of folly.
(2. 4. 26–38)
The passage recalls the conversations between Vernon, Worcester, and
Hotspur in 1 Henry IV, quoted above, and the sartorial metaphor is
a subtle reminder of the Incarnational inflection of Hal’s reformation.
The situation, in which a mistaken, battle-eager young man neglects the
advice of his better-informed followers in his contempt for his adversary,
reiterates the form of the earlier play and shares its structural similarities
with the harrowing plays. This conversation, however, is not preparatory
⁷⁰ For the staging of these inconsistencies, see King Henry V, ed. Emma Smith,
Shakespeare in Production (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 4–79.
to single combat as it was in 1 Henry IV and the harrowing plays. The
Dauphin is not involved in any military action, so Henry cannot worst
him, as he did Hotspur.⁷¹ The allusions to Christ’s triumph in Henry’s
victory have a void at their centre: Agincourt is not staged and so
Henry cannot display heroism on the battlefield. The allusions to the
Crucifixion which are created before the battle by the Chorus’s emotive
speech, and through the king’s actions and language, build up audience
expectations which are undercut by what they witness, or fail to witness,
at Agincourt.
Henry waits alone for the battle to begin, and the scene of his lonely
prayer contains an allusion to the agony in the garden.⁷² The scene,
in which an isolated leader undergoes a spiritual struggle on the eve
of the great reckoning, recalls the mystery play staging of Christ’s own
night-time conflict. Like Christ in the Agony in the Garden play, Henry
enters with attendants, whom he then dismisses, as he wishes to be
alone:
 Shall I attend your grace?
 No, my good knight
I and my bosom must debate awhile,
And then I would no other company.
(4. 1. 29–33)
In the Bible, Jesus also tells his disciples that he wishes to be alone—‘sit
ye here, while I goe, and pray yonder’—and in the mystery plays
his prayers were probably staged as soliloquies. In the Chester play,
for example, the stage directions (‘tunc venit ad discipulos, et invenit
dormientes’, ‘tunc redit ad discipulos’) suggest that the disciples were
staged as sleeping somewhat apart from the praying Christ.⁷³
Henry’s soliloquy is about the subject that governs the story of Geth-
semane: sleep. The symbolic dualism of the agony in the garden involves
⁷¹ The quarto has Bourbon present at Agincourt instead, although the Folio reallocates
his lines to the Dauphin. For a discussion of the discrepancy, see King Henry V, ed.
Andrew Gurr, The New Cambridge Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1992), 224–5. The French king is clear that his son will not be present at the
battle (3. 5. 64–6) although it is a near-universal performance practice to follow the
Folio rather than the quarto. For the evidence about theatrical practice see Smith, Henry
V, note to 3. 8. 0.
⁷² This is briefly acknowledged by a number of critics who have not, however,
recognized the problematic aspects of this allusion: Altman, ‘ ‘‘Vile Participation’’ ’, 25;
Barbara Hodgdon, The End Crowns All: Closure and Contradiction in Shakespeare’s History
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 189.
⁷³ Matthew 26: 36; Chester Mystery Cycle, 15. 280, 296.
the praying, suffering, wakeful Christ and the peacefully sleeping dis-
ciples, and it is precisely this dichotomy that Hal brings to the scene
before Agincourt:
No, not all these, thrice-gorgeous ceremony,
Not all these, laid in bed majestical,
Can sleep so soundly as the wretched slave,
· · · · · · · ·
The slave, a member of the country’s peace,
Enjoys it, but in gross brain little wots
What watch the King keeps to maintain the peace.
(4. 1. 263–80)
The structure of the scene, as well as its rhetoric of suffering leadership
and lethargic companions, imitates that of the mystery plays. The
protagonist’s long periods of lonely prayer are punctuated by brief
conversations with his sleepy followers. Henry’s soliloquy, and his prayer
to the ‘God of battles’ (4. 1. 286), is interrupted by brief conversations
with Erpingham and the Duke of Gloucester. In the N-town, Chester,
and York mystery plays, as well as in the biblical story, this is precisely
the structure of the scene. Jesus repeatedly interrupts his anxious prayers
for deliverance (addressed in the York Agony in the Garden to ‘my fadir
of myght’ (18. 102) ) with exhortations to his followers not to sleep.
Henry’s speeches, as well as his preliminary remarks to Erpingham (‘a
good soft pillow for that good white head | Were better than a churlish
turf of France’ (4. 1. 14–15) ), give the impression that he, likewise, is
the only person who is awake. Henry implies that, like Peter and the
two sons of Zebedee, his followers do not watch and pray as he does,
but slumber off-stage.
Henry, however, creates an inaccurate picture. It is morning, and
his followers, far from sleeping while he alone maintains the watch,
are anxiously waiting for their dilatory king. Unlike Jesus who urges
his somnolent friends to stay awake (Matt. 26: 40), it is the followers
who are urgent with their king: ‘my lord, your nobles, jealous of your
absence, | Seek through the camp to find you’ (4. 1. 282–3).⁷⁴ Henry’s
allusion to the watchful redeemer of the Passion skews the reality of
what is actually happening on the battlefield. As Nina Taunton has
⁷⁴ Olivier’s film, which wants to portray this scene as a parallel to, not a parody of,
Gethsemane, shows the soldiers settle down to sleep after talking to Henry. See Stephen
Buhler, ‘ ‘‘By the Mass, our hearts are in the trim’’: Catholicism and British Identity in
Olivier’s Henry V ’, Cahiers Élisabethains 47 (1995): 62.
argued, Henry’s behaviour in wandering through the camp, and not
safeguarding his royal person, means that his men cannot afford to sleep.
His neglect of his regal function of protecting the king’s person enforces
watchfulness upon his men.⁷⁵ His portrayal of the scene as a secular
version of the agony in the garden is almost a complete inversion of the
true situation.
The scenes which follow Henry’s rousing rhetoric likewise figure the
climactic reckoning at Agincourt in Christian terms. Henry returns to
his small band of nobles after his lonely prayer and tells them that
because of the battle which is about to commence they, and he, will
be remembered for ever: ‘this story shall the good man teach his son’
(4. 3. 56).⁷⁶ Henry’s language of feasts, blood, and ‘flowing cups’ give
a eucharistic colouring to this act of remembrance. In particular the
idea of a decisive moment which will be remembered and reiterated
‘to the ending of the world’ (4. 3. 58) forms a relationship between
the event (Agincourt) and its ritualized memorial (St Crispin’s day)
analogous to that of the Crucifixion and the celebration of Easter, which
marked the yearly reception of the eucharist for most Elizabethans.⁷⁷
This eucharistic imagery is part of the portrayal of Agincourt as a secular
Crucifixion, an image created by Henry and the Chorus as the conflict
approaches.⁷⁸ The Chorus’s description of the English, as they wait for
the battle in which they expect to die, is punctuated with allusions to
the moments preceding Christ’s final contest on the cross:
The country cocks do crow, the clocks do toll,
And the third hour of drowsy morning name.
Proud of their numbers and secure in soul
The confident and over-lusty French
Do the low-rated English play at dice,
⁷⁵ Nina Taunton, 1590s Drama and Militarism: Portrayal of War in Marlowe,

Chapman and Shakespeare’s Henry V (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), 178.
⁷⁶ For the connection of this phrase with the Passover, see Marx, Shakespeare and the
Bible, 46.
⁷⁷ For more on the eucharistic imagery of this speech, see Steven Marx, ‘Holy
War in Henry V ’, Shakespeare Survey 48 (1995): 94–6; Maurice Hunt, ‘The Hybrid
Reformations of Shakespeare’s Second Henriad’, Comparative Drama 32/1 (1998): 195;
Knapp, Shakespeare’s Tribe, 132–40; Debora Kuller Shuger, ‘A Response’, in Christopher
Ocker, ed., Preachers and Players in Shakespeare’s England: Protocol of the Colloquy of the
Center for Hermeneutical Studies (Berkeley, Calif.: Center for Hermeneutical Studies,
1995), 45–6; David Ruiter, Shakespeare’s Festive History: Feasting, Festivity, Fasting and
Lent in the Second Henriad (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), 160–2.
⁷⁸ For similarities in lexicon and syntax between the Chorus and Henry, see Gurr,
King Henry V, 15.
· · · · · · ·
The poor condemnèd English,
Like sacrifices, by their watchful fires
Sit patiently and inly ruminate
The morning’s danger.
(4. 0. 15–25, italics mine)
The gambling soldiers are drawn from the scene in The Famous Victories
of Henry the Fifth in which the French soldiers dice for the English king
whom they assume is soon to be their prisoner. The clothes which the
French are anxious to own are stressed throughout the scene: ‘oh the
brave, brave apparel that we shall | Have anon’.⁷⁹ This combination of
gambling soldiers and clothes recalls the soldiers who diced for Christ’s
tunic under the cross:
Fellowes, nowe let see!
Here are dyce three.
Which of all wee
shall wynne this
ware?⁸⁰
The Towneley mysteries have a play dedicated entirely to this episode,
and the York cycle once also had a Play of the Dice in which ‘Pilatus at
alii milites ludebant ad talos pro vestimentis Jesu.’⁸¹ The importance of
the soldiers’ gambling was expressed in the Coventry mystery play by
emblazoning their jackets with nails and dice.⁸² The French soldiers in
Henry V are less close to the biblical story than those in The Famous
Victories, but nonetheless the dicing soldiers, so confident and careless,
unaware of the enormity of what is about to happen, are part of the
Crucifixion imagery, along with the cock crow, the third hour, and
Henry’s followers waiting, like Peter, by the fire.
The Chorus’s masterly picture, however, like Henry’s rhetoric, is
nudging the listener towards the wrong conclusion. An audience influ-
enced by the biblical imagery is led to expect an allusion to the
Crucifixion at Agincourt (perhaps the King sacrificing himself and win-
ning the battle in spite of terrible wounds) but the only sacrifice offered
⁷⁹ Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources, iv. 331.

⁸⁰ Chester Mystery Cycle, 16a. 89–92.
⁸¹ See Peter Meredith, ‘The York Millers’ Pageant and the Towneley Processus
Talentorum’, Medieval English Theatre 4/2 (1982): 104–14.
⁸² Ingram, Coventry, 73. The dice were important items in the arma Christi: cf.
Schiller, Iconography, 2, figs. 654–70. For examples of extant depictions of these dice in
Warwickshire, see Davidson, Early Art of Coventry, 30, 63, 123.
is that of the soldiers whom the King has drawn into this unnecessary
war. The Dauphin’s absence from the battlefield means that no decisive
single combat occurs. The duel between Hotspur and Hal in 1 Henry IV
has been replaced by a parodic contest between Pistol and the instantly
capitulating French soldier (4. 4), which is the only staged battle scene.
Henry, however, continues to present Agincourt as a climactic,
victorious event which follows the pattern of Christ’s victory, despite
the absence of a staged martial triumph and the ironic pressure of
Pistol’s farcical terrorizing of Monsieur le Fer. After Agincourt has been
won Henry commands: ‘let there be sung Non nobis and Te Deum’
(4. 8. 123). The historical Henry V was welcomed back into London
by this great hymn of praise and it was sung again on the anniversary
of the victory: ‘the king, mindful of God’s goodness, praised Him again
with the Te Deum, sung in his own chapel before mass’.⁸³ Henry VIII,
in imitation of his forebear, celebrated his victory over the French in
the same way, so the Te Deum in Henry V may have been recognized
as a traditional victory song. Shakespeare knew about the Te Deum
from Holinshed and it is possible that, like his source, he included the
hymn purely to show Henry’s piety.⁸⁴ However, the climactic exit of
the king and his followers to the sounds of the Te Deum after a glorious
victory has another, and theatrical, precedent. It is the climax of both
the Chester and Towneley Harrowing of Hell plays. As Christ and the
hosts of the saved leave the stage, they sing a Te Deum: ‘Tunc eant
omnes, et incipiat Michaell, ‘‘Te deum laudamus’’ ’. At the end of the
Towneley play Isaiah proclaims:
Therfor now let vs syng
To loue oure Lord Iesus,
Vnto his blys he will vs bryng,
Te deum laudamus.⁸⁵
Hal has brought to a close the association between royalty and divinity
he began in 1 Henry IV. Singing the Te Deum is not only a sign of
humility; it is also an allusion to the greatest victory ever won.
⁸³ Gesta Henrici Quinti: The Deeds of Henry the Fifth, trans. Frank Taylor and John
S. Roskell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 178. See also Christopher Allmand,
Henry V (London: Methuen, 1992), 98.
⁸⁴ Charles Wriothesley, A Chronicle of England During the Reigns of the Tudors, from
AD 1485 to 1559, ed. William Douglas Hamilton (London: Camden Society, 1875),
i. 149; Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources, iv. 398.
⁸⁵ Chester Mystery Cycle 17. 275–6; Towneley Plays 25. 413–15.
In 1 Henry IV the allusion to the harrowing of hell might seem
analogous to traditional Tudor monarchist panegyric, because it seems
to place the royal prince in the position of Christ.⁸⁶ However, the
play shows that the divine analogy is an artifice created by Hal for his
own ends, and something which he cannot entirely fulfil. The nuance
imparted to these plays through the allusions to the guiler beguiled
theory of the Atonement has been overlooked in the critical controversy
surrounding Hal. Where biblical echoes have been noticed they have
often been enlisted in a simplistic way as implying support for him as a
holy ruler. For example, James Sims has suggested that the Archbishop
of Canterbury’s description of the new king as ‘full of grace and fair
regard’ (1. 1. 23) alludes to Christ’s entry into his earthly kingdom,
‘And that Word was made flesh, and dwelt among vs (and we sawe
the glorie thereof, as the glorie of the onely begotten Sonne of the
Father) full of grace and trueth’ (John 1. 14).⁸⁷ The parallel is not
close, but if it is intended, contains a slippage: where Christ is full of
truth, Henry is full of ‘fair regard’. What for Christ was inner reality,
for Hal is outward show. Critics have long been aware that despite the
glittering surface of Henry V and the jingoistic portrayal of Henry as
a triumphant king, there might be a disjunction between the apparent
sympathies of the play and what it actually endorses. Henry V has
rousing rhetoric and wins Agincourt, but undercurrents in the play
detract from the king’s portrayal of himself as a perfect leader. The
sacred echoes in 1 Henry IV do not map straightforwardly onto the
secular reality. Hal’s favours are stained with Hotspur’s blood rather
than his own and the duplicity inherent in the guiler beguiled model of
the Atonement becomes problematic when no longer being performed
by (an irreproachable) God.
Throughout the last three plays of the tetralogy Henry constructs
a redemptive ascent by which he intends that the wrong done by his
father can be expiated, and England, the Lancastrians, and the crown
become numinous once more. But Henry V is not only the glorious
zenith of Hal’s redeeming mission, but also the play in which Henry’s
characterization is darkest. The failure of Hal’s attempt to save England
from the civil war which threatens it is made clear by the already written,
⁸⁶ Cf. Henry Chettle’s figuration of Elizabeth as the harrower of hell: Englandes

Mourning Garment, Fr .
⁸⁷ Sims, Dramatic Uses of Biblical Allusions, 52.
already staged, horror of the Wars of the Roses, recalled in the epilogue
of Henry V :
Henry the Sixth, in infant bands crowned king
Of France and England, did this King succeed,
Whose state so many had the managing
That they lost France and made his England bleed,
Which oft our stage hath shown.
(Epilogue, 9–13)
Hal is an extremely successful king, but the illusion of divinity is part of
his masterful manipulation of appearance, not the result of his Christian
kingship.
6
‘Usurp the beggary he was never born to’:
Measure for Measure and the Questioning
of Divine Kingship
On St Stephen’s night 1604 James I sat down to watch a play which

began with these words:
Of government the properties to unfold
Would seem in me t’affect speech and discourse,
Since I am put to know that your own science
Exceeds in that the lists of all advice
My strength can give you.
Measure for Measure begins with an address to Escalus purporting to
instruct him about good government, while acknowledging that (as his
name suggests) his ‘own science’ is so great as to need no such advice.
Simultaneously, the king sitting in the audience is greeted with words
which recall the encomiums directed at him in the sermons on godly
rule which had likewise been performed before him on his entry into
England. Thomas Bilson assured James that in his discussion of the
duties of a prince ‘I may be shorter, because I speake before a religious
& learned king, who both by pen and practise these many yeeres
hath witnessed to the world, how well acquainted he is with Christian
and godly government.’¹ Preachers such as Bilson and Richard Eedes
assured James that he had nothing to learn on this subject, and then
¹ Thomas Bilson, A Sermon Preached at Westminster before the King and Queenes
Maiesties, at Their Coronations on Saint Iames His Day, Being the Xxv. Of Iuly. 1603
(London, 1604), B7v . See also Richard Eedes, The Dutie of a King, Preached before the
Kings Maiestie in Two Sermons, in Six Learned and Godly Sermons: Preached Some of
Them before the Kings Maiestie, Some before Queene Elizabeth (London, 1604), F2v –F3r ;
Elizabeth Pope, ‘The Renaissance Background of ‘‘Measure for Measure’’ ’, in Kenneth
Muir and Stanley Wells, eds., Aspects of Shakespeare’s ‘Problem Plays’: Articles Reprinted
from Shakespeare Survey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 61.
The Questioning of Divine Kingship 155
proceeded nonetheless to present him with their ideas. Shakespeare’s
play implicitly adopts the same strategy, addressing the king as one
who is perfectly versed in this branch of learning, and then staging a
searching exploration of the complexities of good government. Measure
for Measure, like the proliferation of sermons and treatises which greeted
the new king, exploits contemporary interest in the issue of godly rule
at a historical moment when new modes of government seemed to be
available.
In Measure for Measure Shakespeare engaged with the contemporary
debate over godly rule by creating a central character whose quasi-
divine attributes mirrored the contemporary concern that a ruler should
emulate God as far as possible. This chapter will put the interpretations
of the Duke as a ‘God-figure’ into sharper focus and show how this
identification can both compliment and implicitly criticize the King.
The dominant narrative of Measure for Measure would have flattered
James I, if he had recognized in the Duke (who creates a happy ending
by his judicious tempering of justice with mercy) a projection of his own
aims and desires. More fundamentally, however, the play problematized
the contemporary theory of government which conflated human and
divine law. Angelo’s story can be recognized as an explicit warning
against the rule of the godly, but behind this straightforward satire is an
implicit critique of any rule which attempts to collapse the distinction
between the person and the role of those who, as James was fond of
saying, ‘sit in the Throne of God’.² The aspects of the Duke which
have a quasi-divine resonance seem to compliment such divine-right
thinking, but the constant thwarting of his plans—above all their
foundering upon the solid, comic rock of Barnadine—subtly suggests
that the divine pattern cannot find a simple analogue in an earthly ruler.
Peter Lake has argued cogently that:
One of the central ideological tasks being performed by the play is the exposure
and critique of a whole series of confusions and conflations between human and
divine law and authority … These errors and misapprehensions, we should note,
are not confined to puritan schemes for the reformation of manners and the
establishment of godly rule. Rather, they suffuse a whole range of contemporary
² The Political Works of James I: Reprinted from the edition of 1616, ed. Charles Howard
McIlwain (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1918), 14, 333. See also Ernst
H. Kantorowicz, ‘Mysteries of State: An Absolutist Concept and its Late Mediaeval
Origins’, Harvard Theological Review 48/1 (1955): 65–91; Jonathan Goldberg, James
I and the Politics of Literature: Jonson, Shakespeare, Donne, and Their Contempories
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), 65–84.
156 The Questioning of Divine Kingship
assumptions and commonplaces, up to and including the theoretical works on
the nature of kingship and good government produced by James I himself.³
Lake has situated Measure for Measure in its historical framework, a

time when the discussion of moral reformation was dominated by the
idea that human law could mirror divine justice.⁴ Shakespeare satirizes
such thinking: explicitly in the character of Angelo, and obliquely in the
character of the Duke.
When James entered his new kingdom he was greeted with much
excitement by the Puritan faction who saw the reign of a Scottish king as
a new dawn for discipline and rigour within the English church. He was
bombarded with petitions on his journey south, concerning grievances
which embraced both the secular and religious spheres.⁵ James responded
to Puritan aspirations by convening the Hampton Court Conference in
order to discuss the issues raised by the Millenary Petition. Among these
issues, and of particular relevance to Measure for Measure, was a desire
for the firmer regulation of marriage.⁶ Shakespeare’s early Jacobean play
creates a spectre of Puritan rule in the ‘precise’ Angelo, whose belief
in his own sanctity, as well as his enthusiasm for the death penalty for
sexual offences, marks him out as a hot Protestant.⁷ Angelo’s fall can be
read as a defence of the king’s disappointment of Puritan demands at
the Conference, but it is also a wider critique of the conflation of Old
Testament morality with the contemporary rule of law.
Angelo, as is shown in his treatment of Claudio, is not adept at
distinguishing between the human law that he is meant to be enforcing
and God’s law, which he ought to attempt to live by. The Duke leaves
³ Peter Lake with Michael Questier, The Antichrist’s Lewd Hat: Protestants, Papists and
Players in Post-Reformation England (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2002),
668.
⁴ Ibid. 622–3 and passim. See also Lake, ‘Deeds against Nature’, 257–83.
⁵ R. C. Munden, ‘James I and ‘‘the Growth of Mutual Distrust’’: King, Commons,
and Reform, 1603–1604’, in Kevin Sharpe, ed., Faction and Parliament: Essays on Early
Stuart History (Oxford: Clarendon, 1978), 43–72.
⁶ J. R. Tanner, ed., Constitutional Documents of the Reign of James I (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1960), 56–69; Patrick Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan
Movement (London: Jonathan Cape, 1967), 448–67.
⁷ For contemporary advocates for the death penalty for sexual offences, see Thomas
Cartwright, The Second Replie of Thomas Cartwright: Against Maister Doctor Whitgiftes
Second Answer Touching the Churche Discipline (n.pl., 1575), N2v –N3r ; Philip Stubbes,
The Anatomie of Abuses (London, 1583), G7v –Hv ; Donald J. McGinn, ‘The Precise
Angelo’, in James G. McMananway, Giles E. Dawson, and Edwin E. Willoughby,
eds., Joseph Quincy Adams Memorial Studies (Washington, DC.: The Folger Shakespeare
Library, 1948), 129–39.
him with the words ‘Mortality and mercy in Vienna | Live in thy tongue
and heart’ (1. 1. 44) but only one of these commissions engrosses
him. Shakespeare specifically alters his sources to make Claudio’s sin
as excusable as possible, but Angelo makes no attempt to judge the
mitigating circumstances. As Peter Lake has shown, Angelo’s case
against Claudio hinges on his conflation of a hot Protestant view of
God’s law (in which there is no venial sin because of the infinite glory of
the party offended) and human law, in which it is incumbent upon the
magistrate to distinguish between levels of offence.⁸ This conflation of
human and divine law is highlighted by Claudio’s response to his arrest:
Thus can the demigod Authority
Make us pay down for our offence, by weight,
The bonds of heaven. On whom it will, it will;
On whom it will not, so; yet still ’tis just. (1. 2. 112)
Lake shows that Claudio’s response is that of a reprobate towards a

Calvinist God (who is always justly offended), but does not note that
Shakespeare makes this interpretation clear by alluding to Romans 9,
the proof text for predestinarian theology: ‘I wil haue mercy on him, to
whom I wil shew mercie: and wil haue compassion on him, on whom I
will haue compassion’ (Rom. 9: 15). Just as God exercises this arbitrary
power in order that ‘my Name might be declared throughout al the earth’
(Rom. 9: 17), Claudio bitterly concludes that Angelo’s action is simply
‘for a name’ (1. 2. 157).⁹ The biblical allusion highlights both Angelo’s
conflation of human and divine power, and the tyranny implicit in such
an action. As Isabella says: ‘O, it is excellent | To have a giant’s strength,
but it is tyrannous | To use it like a giant’ (2. 2. 109–11). Angelo has
Jove’s thunder but unlike God, who in Romans 9 is justifying his right
to be merciful on anyone he chooses, Angelo’s predestinarian mind asks
only for death and judgement, for himself as much as for others: ‘I crave
death more willingly than mercy’ (5. 1. 475).
Angelo’s position has an integrity to it (except in his treatment of
Mariana and Isabel), but it is an integrity which ignores not only his
own need for mercy but also the earthly nature of his power; as Isabella
who once more reminds him: ‘’Tis set down so in heaven, but not in
earth’ (2. 4. 50). Angelo’s fall, therefore, in which he is punished for
⁸ Lake, The Antichrist’s Lewd Hat, 660–1.

⁹ Ibid. 657–8; Louise Schleiner, ‘Providential Improvisation in Measure for Measure’,
Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 97/2 (1982): 230–1.
his denial of human sexuality by falling prey to uncontrollable lust, is
one facet of the play’s critique of godly rule. Angelo’s whole rationale
of justice, not merely his position on sexual conduct, is undermined
by his transgression, and his fall satirizes all who believe that their own
unassailable moral purity is the platform from which they gain the right
to judge others. Angelo seems to have learnt from the story of the
woman taken in adultery not that no one should cast the first stone, but
that all her accusers ought likewise to have been stoned to death.
Although the dominant satire of the play is directed at the Pharisaical
judgements of Angelo, the universal mercy of the Duke—although
preferable—is not presented as the perfect answer. The problem of
how to enforce justice in Vienna has not been solved by the Duke’s
machinations, only the problems created by his attempted solution. As
A. D. Nuttall has pointed out ‘we can approve his behaviour at the end
of the play only at the cost of condemning his behaviour at its outset’.¹⁰
In addition the Duke’s universal clemency produces the structure of
a comic conclusion rather than actual happiness, as Shakespeare hints
through the insistent open silences of almost all the characters at the end
of the play. Lucio, Angelo, and quite possibly Isabella are not contented
by their marriages; neither Angelo nor Barnadine asks to be forgiven
and, although she will probably be overlooked by most members of the
audience, Mistress Overdone, who by bringing up Lucio’s bastard at
her own cost has performed one of the few altruistic acts of the play,
is still languishing in prison. Madam Overdone’s punishment, while
a murderer and attempted rapist are pardoned, speaks of the uneven
enforcement of judgement which is not grounded in law. This subtext
would presumably have been overlooked by the royal audience, but it
may have jarred on other, legally minded spectators. Young men from
the Inns of Court, for example, are known to have flocked to the Globe,
and they may well have been deliberating over the new king’s ideas at
this time.¹¹ W. R. Elton has recently argued that Troilus and Cressida,
which is traditionally grouped with Measure for Measure as a problem
play, reflects, in its argumentative exploration of value and legality, the
¹⁰ A. D. Nuttall, ‘Measure for Measure: Quid Pro Quo?’, Shakespeare Studies 4

(1968): 239.
¹¹ For the popularity of commercial theatre among students at the Inns of Court, see
Wilfrid R. Prest, The Inns of Court under Elizabeth I and the Early Stuarts, 1590–1640
(London: Longman, 1972), 138, 155, 159; Alfred Harbage, Shakespeare’s Audience (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1941), 80–1; G. M. Young, ‘Shakespeare and the
Termers’, Proceedings of the British Academy 33 (1947): 81–99.
interests of the law students he thinks it was written for.¹² Measure for
Measure, as a play centring on the interplay between justice and mercy
under the rule of law, may have been particularly popular in such circles,
and young men from the Inns of Court may have been readier than
their sovereign to recognize the possible critique of the Duke’s actions
embedded in the play.
The Duke’s sweeping but uneven clemency, like many other aspects
of his character, finds a parallel in the new monarch. The specific
similarities between James and the Duke—such as their dislike of
crowds, sensitivity to criticism, and penchant for Roman law—bolster
their more fundamental connection in a shared theory of government
which considers a perfect ruler as one who, all-knowing, moves among
his subjects judging and controlling them undetected.¹³ The quasi-
divine reading of the Duke, the reading which can be seen as most
flattering to James, can also, however, be read as an oblique criticism
of the King. Kevin Sharpe has explored the way in which, at the court
of James’s son, playwrights criticized the monarch through compliment
and coupled censure with praise in an explicit strategy of counsel which
was aimed at persuading the King to best government.¹⁴ The following
readings of the reappearance of Claudio as an allusion to the raising of
Lazarus, and the meeting of Lucio and the Duke as a version of the
temptation in the desert, are suggested as divine analogues which act as
an explicit endorsement of the Duke, and through him the king, but
which also subtly call into question divine-right thinking in which the
ruler could truly imitate God.
James’s actions upon entering his new kingdom suggest a somewhat
theatrical response to his new power. On his progress from Scotland, for
example, he executed a cutpurse without trial at Newark-upon-Trent
and then released all the inmates of the town’s jail. The official response
declared this an exemplary display of justice and mercy, and cast it
in terms of a godlike power: ‘in his benigne and gracious mercie, he
¹² William R. Elton, Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida and the Inns of Court Revels
(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), 117–28, 149–59, and passim.
¹³ For specific correspondences between James and the Duke, see Ernest Schanzer,
The Problem Plays of Shakespeare: A Study of Julius Caesar, Measure for Measure, Antony
and Cleopatra (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963), 121–5; Roy Battenhouse,
‘Measure for Measure and King James’, Clio 7/2 (1978): 201; Leah S. Marcus, Puzzling
Shakespeare: Local Reading and Its Discontents (London: University of California Press,
1988), 173–80; Goldberg, James I and the Politics of Literature, 235.
¹⁴ Kevin Sharpe, Criticism and Compliment: The Politics of Literature in the England
of Charles I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 290–301 and passim.
giues life to all the other poore and wretched Prisoners’. The unofficial
reaction was rather less rapturous. Sir John Harington, for example,
privately expressed his unease about an execution conducted without
due process of law: ‘’tis strangely done: now if the wynde blowethe thus,
why may not a man be tryed before he hathe offended [?]’¹⁵ Harington’s
response to the spectacle at Newark is comparable to those spectators
of Measure for Measure, whose memory of the still imprisoned Mistress
Overdone and Pompey casts a chill over their enjoyment of the general
pardon.
James was fond of displaying his clemency, and a number of critics
have compared his stagey last minute reprieve of (selected) Main and
Bye plot conspirators with the Last Judgement-like Act 5 of Measure.¹⁶
What most of these critics overlook, however, is that the event is
recounted not only in the private correspondence of Dudley Carleton,
but also in a supposedly eyewitness letter which rushed into print in
1603: The Copie of a Letter Written from Master T.M. neere Salisbury to
Master H.A. at London, concerning the proceeding at Winchester; where
the late L. Cobham, L. Gray, and Sir Griffin Marckham, all Attainted
of hie treason were ready to be executed on Friday the 9. Of December
1603. This public letter suggests that James’s inscrutable mercy has a
divine parallel. James is described as making the decision ‘in his owne
secret heart’ and then gives leave to the sheriff to ‘reveale his mysterie’.
This dissimulation is connected with the ineffability of God’s justice by
the author: ‘in this late Action … this blessed King hath not proceeded
after the manner of men and of Kings, sed caelestis Iudicis aeternis Regis
more [but in the manner of the heavenly judge and eternal King]’.¹⁷
The switch into Latin at this moment ensures that the excessive praise is
decorously shrouded, but it also delicately augments the implication of
divine wisdom in James. Latin, once the preserve of the sacred mysteries
¹⁵ John Nichols, The Progresses, Processions, and Magnificent Festivities of King James
the First, His Royal Consort, Family and Court (London, 1828), i. 89; Sir John Harington,
Nugae Antiquae […], ed. Thomas Park (London, 1804), i. 180.
¹⁶ See David L. Stevenson, ‘The Role of James I in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure’.
English Literary History 26 (1959): 206; Steven Mullaney, The Place of the Stage: License,
Play and Power in Renaissance England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988),
106–8; Craig A. Bernthal, ‘Staging Justice: James I and the Trial Scenes of Measure for
Measure’, Studies in English Literature 32/2 (1992): 247–69; Greenblatt, Shakespearean
Negotiations, 136–7; Lake, The Antichrist’s Lewd Hat, 678.
¹⁷ T.M., The Copie of a Letter Written from Master T.M. neere Salisbury to Master H.A.
at London, concerning the proceeding at Winchester; where the late L. Cobham, L. Gray,
and Sir Griffin Marckham, all Attainted of hie treason were ready to be executed on Friday
the 9. of December 1603 […] (London, 1603), A3r , A4v , B2r .
of religion, carries with it the suggestion of something elevated and
unapproachable in the King: the arcana imperii.¹⁸
This mysterious ideal of kingship, the secret knowledge and craft
possessed only by divinely ordained rulers, is likewise present in Measure
for Measure. The play begins and ends with the Duke deferring an
explanation: he promises to disclose the reasons behind his actions, but
does not do so within the audience’s hearing (1. 3. 48–9, 5. 1. 538).
This connection, however, is a clear example of the way that Shakespeare
problematizes such flattering parallels between divinity and kingship.
T.M. implies that the mysteries of state add an additional gloss to
James’s proceedings, but the audience, presented with the Duke’s refus-
al to explain his purpose, may instead be led to question the wisdom of his
proceedings. In Act 1 Scene 3, for example, it is perfectly plausible that
the Duke retreats behind the arcana imperii because his main reason for
his abdication—to shift the job of law enforcement, and its concomitant
unpopularity, on to another—meets with Friar Peter’s censure.¹⁹ Like-
wise the decision to test Angelo by giving him control over Vienna (when
the Duke already knows of his unscrupulous behaviour towards Mari-
ana) seems somewhat unwise. The Duke’s policy of non-explanation
seems to be based on shaky reasoning rather than godlike authority.
The Duke, however, is at his most cagey when he chooses not to
inform Isabella of the fact that her brother is still alive. James’s reprieve
of the conspirators of the Bye plot was contrived in such a way that
Markham, Grey, and Cobham each believed that the others had been
executed. When they were all brought out and pardoned, they ‘looked
strange one upon the other, like men beheaded and met again in the
other world’.²⁰ In Measure for Measure, the Duke likewise conceals
Claudio’s survival, and allows Isabella and Angelo to believe that he
has been beheaded. Royal authority (as Gaunt tersely reminds Richard
II) is usually limited to the taking away of life.²¹ Through Carleton’s
¹⁸ Another moment when hyperbolic praise of the new king is couched in Latin
occurs in Savile’s description of James as one ‘whose presence makes old men sing, satis
se vixisse se viso’. In this case a specific chime with the Nunc dimittis seems intended: John
Savile, King James His Entertainment at Theobalds: With His Welcome to London, Together
with a Salutatorie Poeme (London: 1603), B3r .
¹⁹ For a Machiavellian parallel to this behaviour, see Nuttall, ‘Measure for Measure:
Quid Pro Quo?’, 238–9.
²⁰ Dudley Carleton, Dudley Carleton to John Chamberlain 1603–1624: Jacobean
Letters, ed. Maurice Lee (Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1972), 51.
²¹ ‘K R Why, uncle, thou hast many years to live. | J  G But
not a minute, King, that thou canst give’: Richard II, 1. 3. 219–20.
account of the reprieve, however, as in the official account of James’s
clemency towards Newark’s prisoners—‘in his benigne and gracious
mercie, he giues life to all the other poore and wretched Prisoners’—it
is suggested that this king can bring life, as well as death, to his subjects.
It is an illusion that Vincentio shares with James for Shakespeare, like
Carleton, explores the way in which (to the on-stage audience at least)
the executed man seems to have risen from the dead. Both the Duke
and James demonstrate their power over life and death and in both cases
it is implicitly suggested that such power is quasi-divine.
James’s new subjects presumably intended to please their new king
with such excessive flattery. Ostensibly, however, it was flattery he did
not court. In one of James’s less well-known works he asked that poets
should not write about his own actions, or praise him, but should simply
praise the actions of Christ. He asked to hear about the way that Jesus
miraculously raised the dead: ‘the Bethaniens holy second living’ and it
is as a raising of Lazarus that Shakespeare implicitly presents the return
of Claudio.²²
When the feckless gallant Lucio meets Isabella mourning for her
brother he says to her: ‘by my troth, Isabel, I loved thy brother. If the
old fantastical duke of dark corners had been at home, he had lived’
(4. 3. 151–3). In the Gospel story of the raising of Lazarus Jesus has
likewise left and is not present when his friend is in most need of him.
When Jesus returns, Lazarus has died, and each of his sisters say to Jesus
‘Lord, if thou hadst bene here, my brother had not bene dead’ (John
11: 21, 32). Lazarus’s story prefigures the Resurrection, and so despite
being only in John’s Gospel it has become an essential part of the Easter
story: all the mystery cycles have a play of the raising of Lazarus. In the
N-town Raising of Lazarus Martha’s words are even closer to Lucio’s:
‘A, gracyous Lord, had ye ben here, | My brother Lazare this tyme had
lyved.’²³
Lucio’s words create a connection between Claudio’s reprieve and the
raising of Lazarus, which is borne out in the staging of the moment. One
²² ‘The Uranie’, in James VI, The Essays of A Prentise, in the Divine Art of Poesie
(Edinburgh: Thomas Vautroullier, 1585), Fr –F2v . It seems unlikely that Shakespeare
would have known this poem, as the Essays were only published in Edinburgh. However,
the poem is cited by another English contemporary, Joshua Sylvester: James VI & I,
Poems of James VI of Scotland, ed. James Craigie (Edinburgh: Scottish Text Scoeity,
1955–8) i. 277. For evidence that Shakespeare was aware of at least some of James’s
poetic endeavours, see Emrys Jones, ‘ ‘‘Othello’’, ‘‘Lepanto’’ and the Cyprus Wars’,
Shakespeare Survey 21 (1968): 47–52.
²³ N-town plays, 25. 289–90. See also Chester Mystery Cycle, 13. 418–20.
striking visual connection between the two scenes is that both involve
kneeling women. The supplicatory sisters are usually foregrounded in
depictions of the raising of Lazarus: the Magdalen (like Isabella) is often
more prominent, but Martha and Marianna kneel too.²⁴ Thirty-six lines
of dialogue pass between the plea during which Isabella kneels and the
unmuffling of Claudio, but Angelo’s life—for which the women are
kneeling—has not been granted during that time and so presumably
they kneel until Claudio returns. The modern theatre places great
emphasis on Isabella’s posture—often making her wait extraordinary
lengths of time before kneeling, and this powerful stage image is an
important part of the staging of this scene.²⁵ In the Chester Raising of
Lazarus Mary sinks to the ground in her grief for her brother, declaring:
‘here will I sitt and mourninge make | tyll that Jesu my sorrowe slake’
(13. 325–6). When Jesus arrives Mary prostrates herself before him:
‘tunc Maria videns Jesum prosternat se ad pedes’ (13. 417).
There is another visual connection in what Lazarus and Claudio are
wearing. John’s Gospel describes how ‘then he that was dead, came
foorth, bounde hande and foote with bandes, and his face was bounde
with a napkin’ (11: 44). Calvin argues that John pays such attention to
the graveclothes because he wants to prove that Lazarus was truly dead:
The Euangelist doth diligently reckon vp the kerchiffe, and bandes, to the ende
wee may knowe that Lazarus came out of the graue in such sort, as he was laid
there. The Iewes also retain this manner of burying at this day, that hauing
wounde the bodie in a linnen cloath, they wrap the head apart in a kerchiffe.²⁶
When Claudio returns to the stage he is described as ‘muffl’d’ (5. 1. 484),
a word which might mean just a head covering, like this kerchief, or
the kind of binding wrapped round Lazarus in the mystery plays. A
swaddled upright figure, which is how Claudio might have appeared,
would have been particularly reminiscent of Lazarus, as, in keeping
with Jewish burial traditions, in almost all pictures of the moment
the corpse is vertical.²⁷ The stage picture at the end of Measure for
²⁴ Schiller, Iconography, ii. figs. 570–1.

²⁵ Peter Brook, The Empty Space (London: Macgibbon & Kee, 1968), 89. Kneeling
was a politically charged posture at this time, see Lori Anne Ferrell, Government by Polemic:
James I, the King’s Preachers, and the Rhetorics of Conformity, 1603–25 (Stanford, Calif.:
Stanford University Press, 1998), 142–53.
²⁶ John Calvin, A Harmonie Vpon the Three Euangelists […], trans. Eusebius Paget
(London, 1584), Sv . See also the stage directions in N-Town Plays, 25. 428; Digby
Mysteries, l. 910.
²⁷ Schiller, Iconography, i. figs. 561–4, 571, 577–8.
Measure, as well as Lucio’s language, would have recalled the raising of
Lazarus: two kneeling women, pleading to a powerful man who orders
the reappearance of a muffled, upright figure, caught at the moment
between death and life.
The iconographic representation of Lazarus swaddled in grave clothes
stresses the most important part of his character: his close association with
death. When Claudio comes back (as it seems to the other characters)
from the dead, he does not speak, and through this silence Shakespeare
expresses Claudio’s intimate relationship with death. Claudio’s mute
return to the stage at the end of Measure for Measure is one of numerous
open silences at the end of that play, but it is one of the most intense.
Speech in Shakespeare is a sign of being alive and participating fully in
human life. Characters that others had thought dead—such as Falstaff
at the end of 1 Henry IV (5. 4. 131–5)—are asked to speak to prove
their reality. As Hermione embraces her husband, Camillo likewise asks
for further proof that this woman long thought dead is truly human, ‘if
she pertain to life, let her speak too’ (5. 3. 114).²⁸ This is proof that
Claudio, however, is neither asked for nor gives. Alone among the many
Shakespearean characters who apparently return to life when others had
thought them dead (Hermione, Juliet, Imogen, Thaisa, Hero, Falstaff,
and Egeon’s wife Emilia) Claudio does not speak.
In the biblical account Lazarus, likewise, does not speak after his
resuscitation. The Towneley play, however, makes a striking deviation
from Lazarus’s traditional silence. The Towneley playwright has inter-
polated a 134-line lyric monologue about death into the Lazarus play.²⁹
Lazarus is in a unique position to deliver a homily on this subject, as
he is both alive, and yet has an intimate knowledge of dying and being
dead. Lazarus’s passionate, personal intensity about mortality is some-
thing that Claudio shares. Claudio has the most powerful and haunting
monologue on this subject that Shakespeare, or perhaps anyone, ever
wrote. Claudio, unlike Lazarus, has no knowledge of death, but he
speaks of it with the same terrified fervour:
Ay, but to die, and go we know not where;

To lie in cold obstruction, and to rot;
²⁸ See Philip C. McGuire, Speechless Dialect: Shakespeare’s Open Silences (Berkeley:

University of California Press, 1985), pp. xiii–xiv.
²⁹ For a discussion of the passage see Rosemary Woolf, The English Religious Lyric in
the Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), 319 ff.
This sensible warm motion to become
A kneaded clod. (3. 1. 118–21)
The Towneley Lazarus speaks of the horrors of being ‘closid colde
in clay’ (31. 127) with the same enclosing alliteration as Claudio’s:
‘cold … become | A kneaded clod’. They share fears of cold, rotting, and
becoming like the wind, and most powerfully, a synaesthesic horror of
the dead body being able to feel like a living one.
The connection with the raising of Lazarus, suggested by Lucio’s
words and supported by the staging of Claudio’s return, illuminates
one of the mainsprings of the plot: Claudio’s preoccupation with, and
terror of, death. In the Gospel story, however, the focus is on Christ.
Christ revealed his godhead through this, his last and greatest miracle
before his resurrection. In Measure for Measure the focus is likewise on
the Duke. Shortly before bringing Claudio back to the stage Vincentio
reveals himself in full ducal splendour, and the reappearance of Claudio
is the culmination of his display of power.
It is perhaps telling, however, that phrases which connect the return
of Claudio with the raising of Lazarus congregate at moments of textual
instability. The Duke stipulates that he will write to Angelo and request
him ‘to meet me at the consecrated fount | A league below the city’
(4. 3. 97) but when Angelo receives the letters he wonders: ‘And why
meet him at the gates?’ (4. 4. 4). Shakespeare, or the Duke, apparently
changes his mind about where the final act takes place, although in
both accounts the action happens outside the city walls. The raising of
Lazarus, like the Resurrection, also takes place outside the city walls.³⁰
Another discrepancy which interacts with the Lazarus allusion is the
length of time Claudio will remain dead in the eyes of the world.
Initially the Duke states that Claudio will be hidden away for four days
(4. 2. 159) and Lazarus, likewise, remains in the tomb for four days
(John 11: 39). This is a memorable length of time because it is surprising.
The Evangelist clearly intends the raising of Lazarus to prefigure the
Resurrection, and hence the reader expects three days, rather than four,
to have elapsed since Lazarus’s death. The time compression that follows
in Measure for Measure means that four days becomes two days, and
then only one, but at one point Shakespeare or the Duke seems to
have chosen the time period which would have brought the Lazarus
resonance forward.
³⁰ John 11: 30. For the importance of this setting in Measure see Marcus, Puzzling
Shakespeare, 181 and ch. 4.
As such instability suggests, however, the allusion to the raising of
Lazarus does not work as a simple endorsement of the Duke. The first
and strongest allusion was not only voiced by Lucio but was also coupled
with a phrase that suggests a very different reading of the Duke’s behind-
the-scenes manipulation: ‘by my troth, Isabel, I loved thy brother. If
the old fantastical duke of dark corners had been at home, he had lived’
(4. 3. 151–3). The scene between the Duke and Isabella (Act 4 Scene
3)—a scene between a grieving sister and the man who could have saved
her from this grief—presents the Duke’s action as a faulty imitation
of Christ’s. Jesus responds to the grief of Lazarus’s sister by raising him
from the dead. The Duke in the same position leaves Claudio hidden
away so that he can seem to bring him back to life at a more strategically
dramatic moment. The Lazarus echo shows the Duke imitating the
divine pattern, just as a godly ruler was meant to, but it also highlights
the inherent impossibility of fallible human beings re-enacting divine
law and mercy. At one level the ‘raising’ of Claudio is entirely fake, as
he never actually died, but also even this partial imitation of Christ is
achieved by the Duke only after encountering the exasperating probity
of the Provost, backtracking after Angelo has behaved unexpectedly,
lying to Isabella and entirely failing to carry out his plan for Barnadine.
Without the providential appearance of the head of Ragozine—‘an
accident that heaven provides’ (4. 3. 74)—the Duke’s machinations
would have failed. The Duke’s method of rule, wrapped up in a policy
of non-explanation and a Friar’s cloak which is an objective correlative
for the mystery of statecraft, is placed under considerable strain.
The Duke’s retreat into arcana imperii—his retreat into the Friar’s
cloak—is one of his strongest character attributes and one which has
roots in both James’s penchant for secrecy and his desire for a kingship
that was, as he stated it to be, ‘the trew paterne of Diuinitie’.³¹ Through
the doctrine of the mystery of state James’s wish for a quasi-divine royal
power dovetailed with his desire for privacy: just as human beings are
not permitted to seek too far into God’s secrets, he argued, it is also
unlawful to inquire into ‘the mysterie of the Kings power …. for that
is to wade into the weaknesse of Princes and to take away the mysticall
reuerence, that belongs vnto them that sit in the Throne of God’.³²
James inherited the throne of England from a queen for whom visibility
³¹ James VI & I, Political Works, 54.

³² Ibid. 14, 333. See also Works of Thomas Nashe, i. 286; Kantorowicz, ‘Mysteries of
State’, 65–91; Goldberg, James I and the Politics of Literature, 65–84.
was a valuable tool of government. Through pageantry, processions,
parade, and portraiture, Elizabeth had placed herself as an icon before
her people. But James shrank from the public nature of early-modern
rule, and wrote ruefully of how kings are set ‘upon a publike stage, in the
sight of all the people; where all the beholders eyes are attentiuely bent,
to looke and pry in the least circumstance of their secretest drifts’. This
famous sentence comes from a passage (from the preface to the English
edition of Basilikon Doron) which obsesses about secrecy—‘secretest
actions’, ‘secretest drifts’, ‘secretest thoughts’—even while ostensibly
dealing with the very public business of publishing.³³ James’s detractor
Anthony Weldon famously claimed that James’s motto was Qui nescit
dissimulare nescit regnare.³⁴ This was supposedly Tiberius’s motto, and
James’s ideas of statecraft are in part a Christianizing of the Roman idea
of arcana imperii: Tacitus’s name for Tiberius’s secrets of rule which
must not be meddled in by ordinary mortals.³⁵ The ancient idea of the
mystery of state argued that the obscurity and ineffable quality of the
gods that must be imitated by a ruler if he is to retain respect and power.³⁶
James’s desire to be praised for his inscrutability rather than for
his visible attributes reanimated a theatrical tradition. The disguised
ruler—a popular character from medieval folk tales through to 1590s
comic histories—was reworked as a perfect way to praise the style of the
new king by highlighting the wisdom, holiness, and ineffability of the
monarch. The immediate stimulus for the reanimation of the fashion
for disguised ruler plays was the King’s own well-known penchant for
going undetected about London.³⁷ More fundamentally his rhetoric of
divine monarchy encouraged the performance of plays whose depiction
³³ James VI & I, Political Works, 5. There are nine cognates of ‘secret’ in this passage
alone.
³⁴ Anthony Weldon, The Court and Character of King James (London: John Wright,
1650), H3v –H4r .
³⁵ Tacitus became a fashionable authority on statecraft in the Jacobean court; see
Kenneth C. Schellhase, Tacitus in Reniassance Political Thought (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1976), 109, 157–63. A 1598 translation of Tacitus’s Annals, from which
this phrase comes, was reprinted in 1604: The Annales of Cornelivs Tacitvs, trans. Richard
Grenewey (London, 1604), D4v .
³⁶ Donaldson, Machiavelli and the Mystery of State, 188, 215–16; Marx, ‘Holy War
in Henry V ’, 93; Marx, Shakespeare and the Bible, 52.
³⁷ Gilbert Dugdale, The Time Triumphant […] (London, 1604), B1v ; Robert Ashton,
ed., James I By His Contemporaries: An account of his career and character as seen by some
of his contemporaries (London: Hutchinson, 1969), 62; Wilson, History of Great Britain,
C2v . See Thomas A. Pendleton, ‘Shakespeare’s Disguised Duke Play: Middleton, Marston
and the Sources of Measure for Measure’, in John W. Mahon and Thomas A. Pendleton,
eds., ‘Fanned and Winnowed Opinions’: Shakespearean Essays Presented to Harold Jenkins
of monarchs watching and judging their subjects unbeknownst to them
and then punishing the wicked and rewarding the virtuous in a final rev-
elation engaged with fantasies of divine omnipotence and immanence.
Nashe’s Christ’s Tears over Jerusalem (1593) draws a protracted metaphor
of God’s presence in terms of this more easily apprehended surveillance
of a ruler in language that resonates with Measure for Measure:
In the presence of his Prince, the dissolutest misliuer that lyues, wil not offend
or misgouerne himselfe: how much more ought we, (abyding alwaies in Gods
presence) precisely to strighten our pathes? … God is not absent, but present
continuallie amongst vs, though not in sight yet as a Spirite at our elbowes euery
where, (& so delight many kings to walke disguised amongst theyr subiects).³⁸
James’s shyness could be made into a matter for praise if connected to
this godlike ability to watch and control his people unobserved.
At least nine plays with a plot revolving around a disguised male
authority figure—a ruler, a father, or a husband—were performed in
the years following James’s accession.³⁹ Many of these plays engage with
the Christian nuances of the traditional story in which an ever-present
but unknown ruler acts as a benign patriarch. One of the most striking
combinations of royal praise and religious language is Middleton’s The
Phoenix, which was performed before the king on 20 February 1604.⁴⁰
The play quotes extensively from Basilikon Doron and the chief character,
Phoenix, is about to inherit the throne from someone who has ruled for
‘forty-five years’: exactly the length of Elizabeth’s reign.⁴¹ The play also
(London: Methuen, 1987), 80–7; Curtis Perry, The Making of Jacobean Culture: James I
and the Renegotiation of Elizabethan Literary Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1997), 93–5.
³⁸ Works of Thomas Nashe, ii: 171, 120. There are a number of verbal parallels between
this work and Measure for Measure, and perhaps the name of Shakespeare’s constable (a
sign of the higher authority present at your elbow) could be one. Abundant borrowings
from Nashe by Shakespeare have been shown by J. J. M. Tobin. For an example of
Shakespeare borrowing from this text at this time, see J. J. M. Tobin, ‘Macbeth and
Christs Teares over Jerusalem’, The Aligarh Journal of English Studies 7/1 (1982): 72–8.
³⁹ Middleton’s Phoenix (1604), Marston’s Malcontent (1604) and Fawn (1604),
Day’s Law Tricks (c.1604), Dekker and Webster’s Westward Ho! (1605), the anonymous
London Prodigal (1605), Edward Sharpham’s The Fleire (1607), Dekker’s Honest Whore
part II (1608), and Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure (1604). Samuel Rowley’s When
You See Me, You Know Me (1604) has a section in which the king disguises himself
(Scenes 5–7) and Middleton’s Your Five Gallants (1607) also has a disguised protagonist.
⁴⁰ N. A. Bawcutt, ‘Middleton’s ‘‘The Phoenix’’ As a Royal Play’, Notes & Queries 3/7
(1956): 287.
⁴¹ The Works of Thomas Middleton, ed. A. H. Bullen, 8 vols. (London: John C.
Nimmo, 1885), i: 1. 1 .7; Ivo Kamps, ‘Ruling Fantasies and Fantasies of Rule: The Phoenix
flatters James through the conspicuously named prince. The phoenix’s
associations with fidelity and chastity had been used by Elizabeth, as had
its sacred connotations. From Roman times the phoenix’s self-sacrifice,
resurrection, and eternal life have been connected with Christ’s own and
its emblematic use was central to Elizabeth’s strategy to consolidate the
relationship between royalty and divinity.⁴² James inherited Elizabeth’s
phoenix emblem, and its Christological symbolism, along with her
crown. Praising James as the new phoenix stressed continuity between
the two reigns, and created a mystical union between him and his
predecessor. References to James as a phoenix rising from Elizabeth’s
ashes was one of the most popular tropes in poems celebrating James’s
coronation: in Sorrowes Ioy (1603), for example, James is the ‘Phoenix of
her ashes bred’.⁴³ Praising James as a new phoenix was an artful strategy
for translating the fact that he was not Elizabeth’s direct descendant into
a matter for praise: he is a vigorous reincarnation of an old, sick queen.⁴⁴
In Middleton’s play the emblematic name of the prince is stressed
as, in a highly unusual plot device, he keeps the name while he is
disguised. In the very first line of both Act 4 and Act 5 Proditer calls
his supposed new ally ‘Phoenix’. This has been taken as a mistake (‘the
oversight is trifling’ remarks one editor) but it is more than that. It
stresses the importance of his name in a play in which nomenclature is a
crucial guide to character: Fidelio is faithful, Falso untrustworthy, and
Quieto peaceful. Middleton updates this morality play technique with a
skilful hand: the Knight and the Jeweller’s wife call each other ‘Pleasure’
and ‘Revenue’, nicknames that become morality-type indicators of their
and Measure for Measure’, Studies in Philology 92/2 (1995): 253; David Farley-Hills,
Shakespeare and the Rival Playwrights: 1600–1606 (London: Routledge, 1990), 142–4.
The demand for Basilikon Doron was such that there were five English editions in 1603
alone. Allusions to Basilikon Doron in Measure for Measure also indicate that Shakespeare
had read the King’s book: compare James VI & I, Political Works, 12, 37, with Measure,
1. 1. 32–40; pp. 17–18 with 2. 4. 1–5; pp. 5, 43, with 4. 1. 58–61. See also Stevenson,
‘The Role of James’, 195–205.
⁴² Valerie Jones, ‘The Phoenix and the Resurrection’, in Debra Hassig, ed., The Mark
of the Beast: The Medieval Bestiary in Art, Life and Literature (New York: Garland, 1999),
102–8; Roy Strong, Gloriana: The Portraits of Queen Elizabeth I (London: Thames &
Hudson, 1987), plates 64, 65, 90, 154; Yates, Astraea, 58, plate 6b.
⁴³ Nichols, Progresses, Processions, and Magnificent Festivities of King James, i. 8. See
also i. 11, 15, 16; Thomas Dekker, The Whole Magnifycent Entertainment (London,
1604), Fv . The phoenix image was later used by Shakespeare in a prophecy of James’s
accession to the English crown: Henry VIII, 5. 4. 39–47.
⁴⁴ It is also particularly appropriate praise for a king who had himself written a poem
entitled ‘Ane Metaphoricall Invention of a Tragedie called Phoenix’ in his collection The
Essays of A Prentise.
characters.⁴⁵ The most important allegorical name is that of the prince.
The name is fitting, his friend Fidelio suggests, because he is as unique
and astounding as the bird: ‘thou wonder of all princes, president,
and glory, | True Phoenix’ (1. 1. 135). Fidelio’s words resonate with
quasi-religious praise as do Phoenix’s father’s words at the end of the
play: ‘let me admire heaven’s wisdom in my son’ (5. 1. 80). It is
Proditer, however, when unmasked by Phoenix as a traitor, who makes
the comparison between the prince and God unequivocal: ‘tread me
to dust, thou in whom wonder keeps! | Behold the serpent on his belly
creeps’ (5. 1. 165–6). Middleton, by naming his play and his protagonist
after a bird that symbolized both James and Christ, made his strategy of
praise unambiguous.⁴⁶ He greets the new king with a play in which a
perfect prince, just about to begin his rule, dispenses justice while going
about his subjects undetected. His actions and power are godlike, his
name is a mystical name for Christ, and these attributes reflect praise
onto the new monarch whom he also figures.
The story of the disguised ruler was employed by dramatists at James’s
accession as one way to praise James as quasi-divine. At a fundamental
level the tale dramatizes the hope that God’s omnipotence will finally be
realized in ultimate justice for all men. The godlike aspect of the ruler
who comes to dispense justice at the end of the play is made explicit in
Whetstone’s Promos and Cassandra (1578), the source play for Measure
for Measure. This play is based around a typical parabolic design in which
the master departs, tests his subjects, and returns to punish or reward
them.⁴⁷ The play makes the parabolic connection explicit when the king
forgives Promos at the end of the play with words that recall the parables
of the lost sheep and the prodigal son: ‘the lost sheep founde, for ioye,
the feast was made’.⁴⁸ Shakespeare’s play also recalls Jesus’ stories (in
particular the parable of the unjust servant (Matt. 18: 22–35) ) but he
makes the connection with the absent all-knowing lord of the parables
closer and more complex by having a ruler who never actually leaves, but
⁴⁵ Alan Dessen, ‘Middleton’s The Phoenix and the Allegorical Tradition’, Studies in
English Literature 1500–1900 6 (1966): 299.
⁴⁶ For further connections between the character Phoenix and Christ, see George
E. Rowe, Thomas Middleton and the New Comedy Tradition (Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 1979), 32–3.
⁴⁷ See e.g. the parable of the talents (Matt. 25: 14–30) and the parable of the vineyard
(Matt. 21: 33–44).
⁴⁸ George Whetstone, The [first and] seconde part[s] of the Famous Historie of Promos
and Cassandra set forth in a comicall Discours (London, 1578), M3r .
remains and watches his subjects.⁴⁹ The disguised duke is Shakespeare’s
addition to his source play and he is placed in the role of preserver given
to God in the earlier play: in Promos and Cassandra the Jailer explains,
when he decides not to execute his young prisoner: ‘God it was, within
my mind, that did your safety moue’ (E3v ); in Measure for Measure, it
is the Duke who secures Claudio’s reprieve.
These changes in the plot increase the divine resonances of the
disguise, and when the Duke is unmasked at the end of the play (admit-
tedly by Lucio, which decreases the striking self-revelation presumably
intended by the Duke) Angelo’s capitulation is saturated with religious
resonance:
O my dread lord,
I should be guiltier than my guiltiness
To think I can be undiscernible,
When I perceive your grace, like power divine,
Hath looked upon my passes. (5. 1. 363–7)⁵⁰
In a less well known but attractive parallel between divine and ducal
action in the play, the word ‘remedy’ is used for both the solution to
Claudio’s predicament (Escalus and Angelo think it has ‘no remedy’
(2. 1. 274, 2. 2. 49), but a ‘remedy’ (3. 1. 200) is found by the Duke
through the bed-trick) and Christ’s salvation of mankind:
Why, all the souls that were were forfeit once,
And He that might the vantage best have took
Found out the remedy. (2. 2. 75–7)⁵¹
⁴⁹ Schleiner, ‘Providential Improvisation’, 227–36; Marx, Shakespeare and the Bible,

79–80.
⁵⁰ For Christian interpretations of the Duke in general and these lines in particular,
see G. Wilson Knight, The Wheel of Fire: Interpretations of Shakespearian Tragedy
(London: Methuen, 1961), 79; Roy Battenhouse, ‘Measure for Measure and Christian
Doctrine of the Atonement’, Publications of the Modern Language Association of America
61 (1946): 1029–59; M. C. Bradbrook, ‘Authority, Truth and Justice in Measure for
Measure’, Review of English Studies 17/68 (1941): 385–99; Nevill Coghill, ‘Comic Form
in Measure for Measure’, Shakespeare Survey 8 (1955): 14–27; Darryl J. Gless, Measure for
Measure, the Law, and the Convent (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979); Arthur
C. Kirsch, ‘The Integrity of ‘‘Measure for Measure’’ ’, Shakespeare Survey 28 (1975):
89–106; Pinciss, Forbidden Matter, 46. For a critique of these interpretations, see Nuttall,
‘Measure for Measure: Quid Pro Quo?’; Pope, ‘Renaissance Background’, 61–2; Lake,
The Antichrist’s Lewd Hat, 681; Huston Diehl, ‘ ‘‘Infinite Space’’: Representation and
Reformation in Measure for Measure’, Shakespeare Quarterly 49/4 (1998): 394–5; Shuger,
Political Theologies, 54.
⁵¹ Marx, Shakespeare and the Bible, 89–90.
An Incarnational allusion was likewise argued for by Neville Coghill
who suggested that Lucio’s comment about the Duke—‘it was a mad,
fantastical trick of him to steal from the state and usurp the beggary
he was never born to’ (3. 1. 358–9)—is ‘an overtone reference to the
Incarnation’.⁵² Coghill’s 1955 article created a new theatrical orthodoxy,
and in the succeeding year a production of Measure for Measure was, for
the first time, censured for failing to bring out the divinity of the Duke.
Throughout the 1960s productions of Measure for Measure began to
present the Duke as a semi-allegorical ‘figure of Almighty God’ and
‘the Heavenly Bridegroom’.⁵³ Shakespeare, by altering the story, and
bringing his ruler to live among his subjects like an ordinary man, has
indeed created an allusion to the Incarnation which is not in his source,
and as even A. D. Nuttall grudgingly concedes ‘the Grand Deception of
the Atonement moves beneath the surface of the drama just as certainly
as does the bloody subterfuge of Casare Borgia’.⁵⁴ However, it is not
sufficient to find in the Duke an uncomplicated ‘Christ-figure’—for
once again the Christic allusion suggested by Coghill (‘it was a mad,
fantastical trick of him to steal from the state and usurp the beggary he
was never born to’) is in the mouth of Lucio.
Lucio’s unconscious echo of Incarnational theology is couched in
terms of one of the Bible’s central passages about that event: ‘Christ
Jesus, Who being in the forme of God thought it no robberie to be equal
with God: But hee made himselfe of no reputation, and tooke on him
the forme of a seruant, and was made like unto men.’⁵⁵ Lucio’s word
‘beggary’ lights on the fact that the Duke too has become a servant, as
he himself says to Isabella:
Your friar is now your prince. As I was then,
Advertising and holy to your business,
Not changing heart with habit, I am still
Attorney’d at your service. (5. 1. 379–82)
⁵² Coghill, ‘Comic Form’, 27. For further Incarnational allusions see Battenhouse,
‘Measure for Measure and Christian Doctrine of the Atonement’, 1053; Milward,
Shakespeare’s Religious Background, 223.
⁵³ Jane Williamson, ‘The Duke and Isabella on the Modern Stage’, in Joseph G. Price,
ed., The Triple Bond: Plays, Mainly Shakespearean, in Performance (London: Pennsylvania
State University Press, 1975), 161; Graham Nicholls, Measure for Measure: Text and
Performance (London: Macmillan, 1986), 53.
⁵⁴ Nuttall, ‘Measure for Measure: Quid Pro Quo?’, 245.
⁵⁵ Philippians 2: 5–11. This was the epistle for Palm Sunday: Book of Common
prayer, Ev .
Paul, in Philippians, tries to express Christ’s equality with God, and
hence the extent of the debasement he has willingly endured, with the
harsh word harpagmos—translated by both the Geneva and Bishops’
Bible as ‘robberie’ and by a Tudor preacher as ‘usurp’: Christ ‘dyd not
usurpe equalitie unto god’.⁵⁶ Both ‘usurpe’ and ‘robberie’ find parallels
in Lucio’s ‘steal’ and ‘usurp’ but Lucio has fundamentally inverted the
image of ruler who chooses to exchange his power for life as a mendicant
preacher. What Christ refuses to grasp is equality with God (it is his
right, but he chooses instead to become man), but for Lucio it is beggary
that is inappropriate for the Duke.⁵⁷ Lucio’s words may indicate his
lack of understanding of Christ’s condescension at the Incarnation, but
they may perhaps be accurate about the Duke’s conduct. An earthly
ruler does not have the right to abdicate responsibility. Lucio, despite
his manifest ignorance, momentarily glances at the truth.
Throughout Act 3 Scene 1, the scene between the disguised Duke
and Lucio, the latter pretends to insight that he does not (ostensibly
at least) possess. Lucio’s charade can be very funny, mostly because he
does it with such aplomb:
  I believe I know the cause of his withdrawing.
 What, I prithee, might be the cause?
 No, pardon, ’tis a secret must be locked within the teeth and the
lips. But this I can let you understand …
(3. 1. 395–8)
Lucio, however, lights unconsciously upon the truth. Relating gossip
about the Duke he says, ‘some say he is with the Emperor of Russia;
other some, he is in Rome’ (3. 1. 354–5) and a significant pause
before the words ‘in Rome’ might lead the audience to the realization
of Lucio’s inadvertent accuracy. The Duke, by dressing up as a friar,
has, figuratively at least, gone over to Rome.⁵⁸ Nevill Coghill, however,
⁵⁶ N. T. Wright, The Climax of the Covenant: Christ and the Law in Pauline Theology
(Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1991), ch. 4, esp. 84; Cuthbert Tunstall, A Sermon of Cvthbert
Byshop of Duresme, made Vpon Palme sondaye laste past, before the maiestie of our souerayne
lorde kinge Henry VIII […] (London, 1539), A3v . See also the regal metaphor used
by Calvin for this passage: A Commentarie of M. Iohn Caluine vppon the Epistle to the
Philippians […], trans. William Becket (London, 1584), 31.
⁵⁷ Spenser’s Amoretti 61 is also based on this biblical text (because it is the sonnet
that corresponds with Palm Sunday in Spenser’s liturgical structure). In this poem
when Phil. 2 describes a mere human, it makes them seem proud: cf. Amoretti and
Epithalamion, 93, 191–2.
⁵⁸ M. Lindsay Kaplan, The Culture of Slander in Early Modern England (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1997), 98. In 1603 and 1604 some of James’s subjects did
famously read Lucio’s lucky guesses as true knowingness and the ‘light’
of Lucio’s name as genuine illumination. This interpretation has had
its adherents, and in Robin Phillips’s 1975 production at Stratford,
Ontario, Lucio—as one delighted critic put it—‘searches out the Duke
like a torchlight … this Lucio knew the Duke behind the robes of the
Friar’.⁵⁹ Coghill’s reading is probably mistaken, not least because it
ignores the dramatic irony that Shakespeare was so fond of and the
unwitting discovery of truth which is a hallmark of almost all his clowns,
but despite its oversimplification Coghill’s interpretation does give an
insight into an important aspect of the scene. It illuminates a biblical
resonance that this meeting of disguised ruler and abusive commoner
holds within it: the temptation in the desert.
During the forty days and forty nights that Jesus fasted in the desert,
the devil came to him and tempted him to perform miracles: ‘if thou
be the Sonne of God, commaund that these stones be made bread …
If thou bee the Sonne of God, cast thy selfe downe’ (Matt. 4: 3, 6).
The apparently uncertain words ‘if thou bee the Sonne of God’ make it
appear as though the devil does not know whether Jesus is truly divine,
and is trying to entice him to demonstrate his divinity. This reading
is consonant with the popular medieval ‘guiler beguiled’ interpretation
of the Atonement in which Satan was cozened by the Incarnation, as
has been discussed in the previous chapter. Under the primary sense
of the scene as a temptation—the devil trying to goad Christ into an
exercise of power—runs an undercurrent of psychological taunting:
‘are you really as powerful as you claim?’ The doubt inherent in the
word ‘if ’ led patristic commentators, the writers of the mystery plays,
and sixteenth-century preachers to use the temptation in the desert as
a case-study for the guiler beguiled theory, and even in the seventeenth
century this interpretation was still popular with some preachers. In the
year Measure for Measure was first performed William Perkins argued
that through the temptation in the desert the devil tried to discover
indeed fear (or hope) that he might be sympathetic to the Catholic faith, see Calendar
of State Papers, Domestic Series, of the Reign of James I, ed. Mary Anne Everett Green
(London: Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans, & Roberts, 1857–72), i. 4, 6, 8, 12,
177. My thanks to Jenny Wormald and Benjamin Prance for their helpful discussion of
this.
⁵⁹ Coghill, ‘Comic Form’, 24; Richard Paul Knowles, ‘Robin Phillips Measures Up:
‘‘Measure for Measure’’ at Stratford, Ontario, 1975–6’, Essays in Theatre 8/1 (1989):
48–9.
whether Christ was the son of God. He quotes directly—although he
does not acknowledge it—from Gregory of Nyssa:
If Satan had seene him in his glorie, he durst not so fiercely and so eagerly haue
set vpon him; and therefore [God] doth as the fisherman, who hideth the hooke
and sheweth onely the baite: so Christ he sheweth his manhood, but couereth
as it were with a mantle his Godhead, so that the Diuel seeing him in the base
estate of humiliation might be the more fierce in his temptations and he might
get the more glorious victorie.⁶⁰
The mystery cycles’ dramatizations of the temptation of Christ likewise
centre on the Devil’s attempts to entice Christ into demonstrating
definitively that he is God. The devil is ignorant of the mystery of the
Incarnation and therefore cannot reconcile the fact that Christ is sinless
(and so must be divine) and yet hungry and thirsty (and so must be
human).
This sense of the devil trying, and failing, to comprehend the divinity
which is concealed under Christ’s humanity resonates with the scenes
between Lucio and the Duke. The statement which seems to indicate
that Lucio knows the Duke has become a mendicant and hence that he
has penetrated the Duke’s disguise—‘it was a mad, fantastical trick of
him to steal from the state and usurp the beggary he was never born
to’—echoes, as has been shown, Philippians 2: 5–11, a text intimately
connected with the temptation in the desert. Gregory the Great in
his homily of Jesus’ trial with the devil in the wilderness explained:
‘If grasping honour was not related to avarice, Paul would not have
said of God’s only-begotten Son: He did not think that being equal to
God was something to be grasped … But the means by which he [the
devil] overcame the first man were the same ones which caused him
to yield when he tempted the Second.’⁶¹ Gregory’s explicit connection
of Philippians 2 with Jesus’ ability to overcome the sins with which
the first Adam had been tempted was drawn on both by the author of
the Chester play of the temptation and by post-Reformation preachers.
Lancelot Andrewes’s sermon sequence on the temptation, for example,
explains the length of Christ’s fast thus: ‘As Moses fasted fortie daies
at the institution of the law, and Elias fortie days at the restoration:
so Christ heere. And because hee came but in the shape of a seruaunt,
⁶⁰ William Perkins, Satans Sophostrie Answered by Ovr Saviovr Christ (London, 1604),
D2v , D8r , B7v . For the Gregorian source, see above, Ch. 5 n. 17.
⁶¹ Gregory the Great, Forty Gospel Homilies, trans. Dom David Hurst (Kalamazoo,
Mich.: Cistercian Publications, 1990), 102–3.
hee would not take vpon him aboue his fellow-seruaunts.’⁶² Philippians
2 runs like a vein through sermons on the temptation in the desert
because the relationship between Christ’s divinity and humanity, his
twin nature in which he is both true God and true man, is central to
both texts.
Lucio’s echo of Philippians 2, therefore, is part of the connection with
the temptation in the desert already brought forward by the structure
of the scene—one man taunting another who is in a half-penetrated
disguise, and tempting him to throw off that disguise. Although the
connection between Act 3 Scene 1 and the temptation in the desert has
had no previous critical examination, it has been realized on the modern
stage. It was played in this way in a 1954 production directed by Tyrone
Guthrie and Cecil Clarke, at Stratford, Ontario:
The typological explication of Measure for Measure … can be communicated in
an actual production designed to be seen and heard, rather than read. Numerous
modern productions have, in fact, interpreted the piece so. The one I have
seen is Tyrone Guthrie’s at Stratford Ontario, some years ago. An example will
illustrate. Act III scene 2 contains a dialogue between the Duke as Friar and
Lucio, who slanders the Duke. Typologically, this is viewed as the temptation in
the desert. If you provide the Duke with a voluminous white habit, a Christlike
beard, a cross, and if you costume Lucio as Mephistopheles, then the typological
interpretation is communicated to at least the more perceptive members of the
audience in the visual terms appropriate to the theater.⁶³
Arnold Williams’s interpretation rests on the costuming of the two
principal characters—Lucio was dressed dark and devilish while the
Friar/Duke appeared in a voluminous white habit with sandals and a
beard and vast cross-shaped staff—and indeed it is the characterization
of the Duke and Lucio, as well as their situation, which recalls the
temptation in the desert.⁶⁴ The Duke’s dual nature as ruler and man,
and his concealment of his royal identity, aligns him with Jesus, and
almost every part of Lucio’s character, from his slander to his dandified
costume, connect him with stage representations of evil, both the devil
in the mystery plays and Vices.
⁶² Andrewes, The Wonderfvll Combate, B7v (my italics). See also F7r ; Perkins, Satans
Sophostrie, B7r , C4v ; Chester Mystery Cycle, xii. 174, 181, 183, 199.
⁶³ Arnold Williams, ‘Typology and the Cycle Plays: Some Criteria’, Speculum 43
(1968): 679.
⁶⁴ For the costumes of the Duke and Lucio see Tyrone Guthrie, Robertson Davies,
and Grant Macdonald, Twice Have the Trumpets Sounded: A Record of the Stratford
Shakespearean Festival in Canada (London: J. Garnet Miller, 1955), 83, 96.
Lucio’s name is not only a hint of his devilish side—reminiscent as
it is of the brightest devil, Lucifer—but like all Vices (who proudly
proclaim the names that denounce them: ‘my name is Ambidexter’, ‘I
am Riot’, ‘My very true unchristian name is Avarice’) Lucio is entirely
unabashed by his cratyllic name: ‘my name is Lucio, well known to the
Duke’ (3. 1. 420).⁶⁵ Particularly telling are the parallels between Lucio
and the devil in John Bale’s dramatization of the temptation in the
desert The Temptation of our Lord (1538). Like Satan in the mystery
plays Bale’s devil declares ‘I wyll not leave hym tyll I knowe what he
ys’ (l. 71) and after each failed temptation he asks to ‘walk farther’
with Jesus (l. 163). These suggestions of Satan’s unwanted intrusions on
Christ recall the Duke’s unsuccessful attempts to rid himself of Lucio:
 Sir, your company is fairer than honest. Rest you well.
 By my troth, I’ll go with thee to the lane’s end.
(4. 3. 168–70)
The York cycle shares this sense of the devil being someone Christ has
difficulty shaking off, and stresses the awkward, intrusive intimacy of
the situation. Diabolus pretends to be Jesus’ friend and tries to coax
the truth out of him by saying that since they are so entirely alone no
one else need ever know. The self-evident falsehood of this last state-
ment—proclaimed in a play, perhaps to the audience—is a humorous
way of showing the hollowness of the friendship the devil offers.⁶⁶ When
tempting Christ to transform the stones into bread Diabolus is coaxingly
intimate, adding the short line ‘betwyxe vs two’ so that it sounds like an
encouraging afterthought. This strategy is repeated at the end of the next
stanza: ‘ther sall noman witte what I mene | but I and thou’. He likewise
pretends that it is friendly concern that makes him ask Jesus to eat; he
cares about his hunger because of the ‘old acqueyntance vs by-twene’
(York Plays, 22. 58–66). Diabolus, like Lucio, is unconsciously accurate,
as God and the devil have indeed known each other long.
This strategy of pretend friendship is shared by a number of Vices.
Hypocrisy in Lusty Juventus tries to ingratiate himself with Juventus by
alleging to be an old acquaintance, and meets with the same bemused
reaction as Lucio does:
⁶⁵ For an exploration of the connections between Lucio and the Vice see Mathew
Winston, ‘ ‘‘Craft Against Vice’’: Morality Play Elements in Measure for Measure’,
⁶⁶ Diabolus enters by pushing through the spectators, which underlines the irony:
York Plays, 22. 1–4.
 For to my symple knowledge I never knewe,
That you and I together were acquainted
· · · · · · · · · ·
 Yes I have knowen you ever since you were bore.⁶⁷
Diabolus’s and Hypocrisy’s heavy-handed attempts at amity are similar
to the intimacy that Lucio forces on the Duke: ‘I am a kind of burr; I
shall stick’ (4. 3. 172).⁶⁸ In Act 3 Scene 1 Lucio is likewise impudent
in his claims to have been ‘an inward’ (3. 1. 394) of the Duke’s. These
boasts, as with Juventus and Hypocrisy, are proved to be false when
the Duke has to ask Lucio’s name; although ironically Lucio uses the
moment to assert once more that he and the Duke are old friends:
 I pray you, your name?
 Sir, my name is Lucio, well known to the Duke. (3. 1. 419–20)
Lucio’s pretence that he is one of the Duke’s intimate acquaintances
is part of his character as a social climber, and the good side of his
character—his apparently genuine friendship with Claudio—is the flip
side of his disloyalty to less advantageous friends such as Pompey. Lucio
taunts the captive Pompey—‘what, at the wheels of Caesar? Art thou
led in triumph?’ (3. 1. 311–12)—just as the Vices mock their less
fortunate fellows who make the mistake of getting caught: New-fangle
sneers at Cutpurse, Pickpurse and Tosspot: ‘ha ha ha, there is a brace of
hounds | … Beholde the huntsman leadeth a way’.⁶⁹ Lucio’s slander, his
social mobility, his unwelcome and enforced friendship, his falsehood,
and his inability to penetrate the Duke’s disguise, all link him with stage
representations of evil in general, and with the devil in the temptation
in the desert in particular.
Lancelot Andrewes’s sermon on the temptation in the desert states
that the devil defames God to Christ in the first temptation.⁷⁰ Part of
⁶⁷ An Enterlude called Lusty Juventus (Oxford: Malone Society Reprints, 1971),

ll. 549–67.
⁶⁸ There is also a verbal link between Lucio and Hypocrisy, which shows they have
the same sense of humour and coarseness of expression. When Hypocrisy sees Juventus
kissing, he cries out: ‘What a hurly burly is here, | Smick smack—You will go tick tack’
(l. 825). The bawdy pun on the game which involved putting pegs in holes is also
evident when Lucio wishes that Claudio’s head may not be ‘lost at a game of tick-tack’
(1. 2. 180). Surprisingly, the Oxford English Dictionary has no mention of this sexual
innuendo: s.v. tick-tack.
⁶⁹ Ulpian Fulwell, Like Will to Like (1568), in Two Moral Interludes (Oxford: The
Malone Society, 1991), ll. 1254–5. See also Nice Wanton, in Specimens of the Pre-
Shakespearean Drama, ed. John Matthews Manly (New York: Biblo & Tannen, 1967),
176.
⁷⁰ Andrewes, The Wonderfvll Combate, A4v –A5r .
the temptation that Jesus undergoes, therefore, is to save his Father from
slander by showing his power. The Duke is likewise tempted to save
himself from Lucio’s taunts by revealing his true nature. Contemporary
sermons on the temptation in the desert all draw attention to the
meaning of Satan’s name, which signifies: ‘a cauiller, a slaunderer, a
priuie accuser’.⁷¹ Slander is an important part of Lucio’s character, and
it is a vice about which the Duke, like James, is particularly sensitive.
In 1587, not long after James had taken over personal rule of his
Scottish kingdom, a law was passed against slander. The law tied the
punishment of the slanderer directly to the importance of the person
defamed, declaring that the fate of such as speak ‘wordis of untreuth,
to sklander, and sa far as in thame lyis to spott, the fame, honnoure
and reputatioun of the saikles and innocent … salbe subject to the same
pane and punishment, in thair personis, landis and guidis, that is dew
to the personis aganis quhome they all writt the saidis libellis and utter
the saidis speichis’.⁷² The Duke is clearly following the same logic when
he sentences Lucio to death for the defamation of his character. Despite
the fact that the punishment is swiftly mitigated, the Duke does not
forget Lucio’s slanders uttered against him in Act 3 Scene 1, whatever
he may claim (5. 1. 518), and when Lucio complains against the severity
of his punishment, Vincentio proclaims ‘Slandering a prince deserves
it’ (5. 1. 523).
The Duke’s musings over defamation—‘What king so strong | Can
tie the gall up in the slanderous tongue? (3. 1. 447)—show how
little he has enjoyed his encounter with Lucio. In Act 3 Scene 1 the
Duke’s humility in becoming an ordinary man is put to a rather severe
test. The devil openly taunts Jesus, whereas Lucio is not aware that
he is provoking the Duke, but both the devil and Lucio share an
uneasy ignorance of exactly who their interlocutor is. The possibility
of Coghill’s reading—that Lucio has genuinely penetrated the Duke’s
disguise—interacts with the devil’s uncertainty about whether Jesus is
truly God. Both Lucio and Satan remain on the borderline between
knowledge and ignorance, and in both Shakespeare and the mystery
plays the uncertainty is played as comedy. The dramatic irony which
makes the scenes between the Duke and Lucio funny is also present in
⁷¹ Perkins, Satans Sophostrie, C2v . See also John Udall, The Combate betwixt CHRIST
and the Deuil (London, 1588), B3v ; Andrewes, The Wonderfvll Combate, G2v .
⁷² The Register of the Privy Council of Scotland, ed. David Masson (Edinburgh: HM
General Register House, 1881), iv. 141.
that early joke in the Chester play in which the devil promises secrecy
which the audience contradict by their presence. Dramatic irony gives
the spectators a sense of power, an ascendancy over the character who
provides it, and this is necessary to the comedic ending of the mystery
plays’ plot. The audience know that Christ is God and because the devil
does not, the redemptive ending is assured. Likewise the fact that the
Friar is also the Duke means that the audience know the monstrous
ransom will be unsuccessful and all will end well.
The mystery play echo in this scene creates an assurance of a happy
ending. It forms part of the comedic impulse of the play. However,
unlike in earlier dramatic treatments of the temptation, the comedy is at
the expense of the tempted as well as of the tempter. The discomfiture
of the Duke is funny, especially as he immediately seeks the consoling
praise of Escalus in order to restore his damaged self-esteem (3. 1. 488).
The fundamental issue of half-penetrated disguise is used in a far more
broadly humorous way as a comic device in Measure for Measure than
it ever was in the mystery plays, for in Shakespeare the disguised figure
does not come out of the encounter unscathed. Christ shows his divinity
by rising above all the temptations he is offered. The Duke reveals how
human he truly is by being distinctly rattled by the encounter.
In Act 3 Scene 1 it is once more Lucio who unconsciously illuminates
the pretensions of the Duke to Christlike action. Lucio’s twisted biblical
allusions, both to the raising of Lazarus and to the Incarnation, bring
forward the true model of divine kingship which the Duke tries to
emulate but cannot attain. Early in the play there had been a transient
echo of the temptation in the desert in the suggestion that Angelo’s
blood is such snow broth that he would not even be attracted by the
offer to turn stone into bread: he ‘scarce confesses | That his blood
flows, or that his appetite | Is more to bread than stone’ (1. 3. 51–3).⁷³
This ironic glance at Angelo’s apparently Christlike capacity to resist
physical pleasure is present to hint at the fall that must inevitably
follow such egoism. The biblical echo points to an obvious satire
against Angelo—who, as it turns out, is not very good at resisting
temptation—but its resurfacing in Act 3 Scene 1 forms a subtler and
gentler questioning of the Duke. The biblical resonance, as with the
allusion to Romans 9 discussed at the beginning of this chapter, forms
an explicit condemnation of Angelo’s behaviour, but the same allusion
also highlights some of the inconsistencies in the Duke’s position as he
⁷³ Schanzer, Problem Plays of Shakespeare, 92.

attempts, but does not precisely achieve, the perfect tempering of justice
with mercy.
At the climax of the play Vincentio endeavours to create a Last
Judgement-like scene, and it is once more Lucio who unwittingly
unmasks the skewed connection between the divine prototype and the
Duke’s actions, when he declares: ‘the Duke yet will have dark deeds
darkly answered: he would never bring them to light’ (3. 1. 435–7).
Lucio reverses the biblical commonplace about the apocalypse, the
final raising of the veil. Christ declares: ‘there is nothing couered,
that shall not be reveiled; neither hid, that shal not be knowen.
Wherefore whatsoeuer ye haue spoken in darknesse, it shall bee heard
in the light’ (Luke 12: 2–3, Matt. 10: 26–7). Lucio’s words, like
the Duke’s—‘Look, th’unfolding star calls up the shepherd. Put not
yourself into amazement how these things should be; all difficulties are
but easy when they are known’ (4. 2. 202–5)—link the revelations of
the final Act with the Last Judgement.⁷⁴ Lucio, however, implies that
because of the Duke’s own ‘feeling for the sport’ he would conceal the
sexual encounters occurring in the dark corners of his jurisdiction. He
turns the biblical phrase upside down: revelation becomes concealment,
and judgement, complicity. The Duke struggles free of Lucio’s slander
and does (eventually) preside over the disclosures of the final act, but he
has been the ‘duke of dark corners’ that Lucio calls him.
The ideas of light and dark, revelation and judgement, which are
encapsulated in both the Duke and Lucio’s speeches are also brought
together in the Epistle to the Reader, which James added to the 1603
English edition of Basilikon Doron: ‘Charitable Reader, it is one of
the golden Sentences, whiche Christ our Sauiour vttered to his Apostles,
that there is nothing so couered, that shal not be reuealed, neither so
hidde, that shall not be knowen: and whatsoeuer they have spoken
in darkenesse, should be heard in the light.’⁷⁵ James does not see
himself as the judge here, but as the accused; and in a theatre even
the Duke is open to perpetual scrutiny. The biblical analogues that
ratify his power and his actions also subject them to searching analysis.
The Duke is a better ruler than Angelo, and he is not the lascivious
man that Lucio makes him out to be. The king can be flattered by
⁷⁴ For straight religious readings of Lucio’s words see Gless, Measure for Measure, 254;
Sarah C. Velz, ‘Man’s Need and God’s Plan in ‘‘Measure for Measure’’ and Mark IV’,
Shakespeare Survey 25 (1972): 37–44.
⁷⁵ James VI & I, Political Works, 4.
the comparative justice and mercy of this ruler who quotes from his
book, and shares his penchant for passing unknown among his people.
However, although Lucio’s intended attacks on the Duke’s character
may be satire that does not finally stick, his unconscious echoes of
the Christ’s example—the Incarnation, the temptation in the desert,
the raising of Lazarus, and the Last Judgement—do draw the Duke’s
methods into question. The analogues, like the Duke’s plans, do not
run smoothly. The uncomplicated mapping of divinity onto kingship is
shown to be impossible as the Duke must resort to disguise and deceitful
stratagems to accomplish what Christ performed through sovereignty
of nature. James can enjoy the panegyric in which he is praised as a
monarch following in the footsteps of God, but he is also reminded to
take such panegyric with a pinch of salt.
The title of Measure for Measure is drawn from a piece of Scripture
which lies at the heart of the problem of the proper relation between
justice and mercy. Jesus’ injunction to forgive others is couched in
language which recalls the syntax of the old ‘eye for an eye’ law of
substitionary justice:
Iudge not, and ye shal not be iudged; condemne not, and ye shall not bee
condemned: forgiue, and ye shalbe forgiuen. Giue and it shalbe giuen unto
you: a good measure, pressed downe, shaken togethr and running ouer shall
men giue into your bosome: for with what measure ye mete, with the same shal
men mete to you againe.⁷⁶
When the title-phrase is quoted within the play it is intentionally twisted
by the Duke so that it appears to partner the law which it is in fact
intended to transcend:
The very mercy of the law cries out
Most audible, even from his proper tongue,
‘An Angelo for Claudio, death for death’.
Haste still pays haste, and leisure answers leisure;
Like doth quit like, and measure still for measure.
(5. 1. 404–8)
‘An eye for an eye’ was indeed ‘the very mercy of the law’: it ensured
that the injured party did not exact more than their injury. However,
⁷⁶ Luke 6: 37–8. Compare with Deut. 20: 21, Exod. 21: 23–5, Lev. 24: 17–20. Pope
points out that the Lucan version of ‘measure for measure’—with its explicit connection
of this passage with the command to forgive—would have been the best known: Pope,
‘Renaissance Background’, 58.
the Duke hopes that Isabella will hear the new message of mercy which
is embedded in his trite, rhyming moralizing about equity. ‘Measure
still for measure’ here, therefore, is used in an ironic way, just as it was
the first time Shakespeare used the phrase in his drama. In 3 Henry VI
Warwick twists its meaning to accommodate his revenge ethic: swapping
the head of York for the head of Clifford on the town’s gates, arguing
that ‘Measure for measure must be answerèd’ (3 Henry VI, 2. 6. 55).
The casual brutality of Warwick’s use of the phrase seems to resonate in
Measure for Measure, which likewise revolves around the substitution of
heads, as well as their more comedic version—maidenheads.
Measure for Measure transforms the ‘head for a head’ ethic of substi-
tutionary justice, but the substitionary mercy which replaces it is not
shown to be easy to enforce. Measure for Measure explores the fissures
that result when the Gospel’s radical message of mercy is negotiated
in the fallen world of human law and order. The practicalities of judi-
cial mercy, which must be faced by a king who wants a Christlike
rule, are confronted in the awkward and often unsettling comedy of
Shakespeare’s play. As Elizabeth Pope has argued, Shakespeare does not
commit the same ideological elisions of which many of his contempor-
aries were guilty in their discussions of a biblically based government.
Instead he holds the doctrine ‘true to its own deepest implications’.⁷⁷
Measure for Measure can be read as an explicit endorsement of James’s
project of Christian kingship, but also as an implicit warning that divine
mercy and English law are not natural bedfellows, and the attempt to
imitate the former while enforcing the latter may be more complex than
he, or his subjects, have been led to believe.
⁷⁷ Pope, ‘Renaissance Background’, 71.

Conclusion
The final scene of one of Shakespeare’s last plays ends with one of
his most powerful engagements with earlier biblical theatre. The statue
scene in The Winter’s Tale has long been recognized as influenced by
the mystery plays and has often been described in frankly religious
terminology.¹ This scene also lies at the heart of the ‘spiritual’ reading
of Shakespeare’s late plays which has been emphasized at the expense of
recognizing biblical allusions and mystery play staging in Shakespeare’s
earlier works. This book, however, has endeavoured to show that an
intimate engagement with religious terminology, biblical language, and
the scenic form of the mysteries is present from the beginning of
Shakespeare’s career.
The penultimate scene of The Winter’s Tale involves the reunion
between father and daughter. The reunion, however, is not staged, only
reported.² Shakespeare bypasses the conclusion which the audience had
been expecting and instead redirects its attention to an unexpected,
miraculously happy ending.³ The explanation of why Shakespeare has
resorted to the messenger scene so common in classical drama lies in its
power as a foil to the scene that follows, which constructs ‘visual wonder
as the truest image of what theater can be’. As Michael O’Connell
argues: ‘what becomes most significant theatrically is the way the scene
comes to insist on faith in what is seen … if the scene for the moment
¹ Stanley Cavell, Disowning Knowledge: In Six Plays of Shakespeare (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1987), 218; O’Connell, Idolatrous Eye, 142. It was perhaps
in recognition of this that The Winter’s Tale was chosen for a court performance on
Easter Tuesday 1618: Chris R. Hassel, Renaissance Drama & the English Church Year
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1979), 142.
² For Johnson’s imputation of laziness in Shakespeare for only narrating this scene,
see The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson: Johnson on Shakespeare (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1968), vii. 308.
³ J. A. Bryant, Hippolyta’s View: Some Christian Aspects of Shakespeare’s Plays (Lexing-
ton: University of Kentucky Press, 1961), 207–8.
Conclusion 185
fully associates theatricality with idolatry, Shakespeare does not counter,
but embraces the charge’.⁴
As Hermione’s statue is brought back to life, the on-stage audience
who love her ache to touch her. Perdita asks ‘Give me that hand of yours
to kiss’ to which Paulina responds ‘O, patience! | The statue is but newly
fixed; the colour’s | Not dry’ (5. 3. 46–8). The desire is likewise expressed
by Leontes, to whose impetuous ‘I will kiss her’ Paulina responds: ‘Good
my lord, forbear. | The ruddiness upon her lip is wet. | You’ll mar it if
you kiss it’ (5. 3. 80–2). When Mary Magdalen approaches her risen
Lord she also tries to touch him and receives the reply: ‘touch me not:
for I am not yet ascended to my Father’.⁵ Paulina’s swift admonition
that the onlookers must not touch the statue is linked with Christ’s
‘Noli me tangere’ because in both cases the precipitance of human desire
for physical intimacy is out of keeping with the mystery. The Bishops’
Bible’s gloss understands Jesus’ enigmatic utterance in precisely this way
‘hereby Christe corrected her carnal affection, lokynge to much to his
bodyly presence’. In the Bible, Mary only tries to touch Jesus, but in
the N-town play she desires, with Perdita and Leontes, to kiss him:
‘thyn holy fete that I may kys’ (37. 41).⁶ The situation of revelatory
reappearance and the impulsive but rebuffed affection of someone for a
beloved who they thought was dead is sufficiently close for the specific
connections of ‘do not touch’ and the possible shared staging of the
kiss to be striking. There is another illuminating connection between
the two moments, in that Paulina’s swift prohibition is metonymic of a
deeper separation. The reconciliation between Hermione and Leontes
(unlike that of Mary and Christ) is physical, but because it is not verbal
it is not complete and she holds back from him something she does
⁴ O’Connell, Idolatrous Eye, 140–1. ⁵ John 20: 17.

⁶ Cynthia Marshall, Last Things and Last Plays: Shakespearean Eschatology (Carbondale:
Southern Illinois University Press, 1991), 122–6; Cynthia Lewis, ‘Soft Touch: On the
Renaissance Staging and Meaning of the ‘‘Noli me tangere’’ Icon’, Comparative Drama
361 (2002): 54, 70. The expression of the Magdalen’s spiritual love of Christ as desire
for physical intimacy with him is quite common in medieval plays. For example, in the
anonymous Florentine Rappresentazione della conversione di Santa Maria Maddalena, she
also longs: ‘to press my lips to your feet’ (quoted and translated in O’Connell, Idolatrous
Eye, 76). The Holkham Bible Picture Book likewise portrays the Marys kissing the feet
of the resurrected Christ: The Anglo-Norman Text of the Holkham Bible Picture Book,
ed. F. P. Pickering (Oxford: Anglo-Norman Text Society, 1971), fo. 36. For another
possible reference to the Noli me tangere in Shakespeare see Cynthia Lewis, ‘Viola’s ‘‘Do
Not Embrace Me’’ as Icon’, Notes & Queries 233/4 (1988): 473–4; Yu Jin Ko, ‘The
Comic Close of Twelfth Night and Viola’s Noli me tangere’, Shakespeare Quarterly 48
(1997): 391–405.
186 Conclusion
not withhold from her daughter. Christ speaks to Mary, but he will not
let her touch him, a reserve which he does not display in his dealings
with the other disciples: Thomas, for example, is enjoined to put his
hand into Christ’s side. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century theologians
generally explained Christ’s reaction in terms either of the Magdalen’s
sin—as a prostitute she was too fleshly minded—or metaphorically
as a message to the believer to look beyond things of the flesh and
towards those of the spirit. The need to explain away the apparent
rebuff (why should her loving gesture meet with coldness?) shows that
it was recognized.⁷
Hermione embraces her husband, but she does not speak to him.
The physical reunion which Christ had forbidden is, after the initial
reaction of Paulina, allowed, but the lack of speech makes it, in
some sense, incomplete. Shakespeare includes the faintest echo of the
incestuous desire (which, in his source, Pandosto feels for his daughter)
in Leontes’s admiration of Perdita’s beauty, and the reunion resonates
with the unfaithfulness of Alcestis’s husband who seeks another bride.
Hermione, like Alcestis, does not speak to her husband once she has come
back from the dead.⁸ Shakespeare makes a powerful, swift, and widely
comprehensible allusion to the difficulties of reunion by importing the
trappings of a Noli me tangere scene into his work. The religious echo
makes these ideas comprehensible to almost all his audience, not simply
to those literate members who had read Pandosto, or the occasional one
who might have been aware of Alcestis. Hermione forgives her husband,
but the moment of reunion remains problematic. The Noli me tangere
is a perfect image for a lack of smoothness that is not unloving.
One of the reasons that the recognition of the Noli me tangere here
is particularly powerful is that in addition to the sacred analogue of a
secular reunion which captures both the passion and the uncertainty with
which Shakespeare has imbued his story, there is also space in this play
to import some of the holiness of the biblical original. The story about
the resurrected Christ has particular resonance for The Winter’s Tale in
which Hermione is apparently coming back from the dead not only for
⁷ Lancelot Andrewes preached his 1621 Easter sermon precisely on this question:
Andrewes, XCVI Sermons, Ccc4r -Ddd2v .
⁸ For more on the connections with Alcestis, see Sarah Dewar-Watson, ‘Shakespeare’s
Poetics: Genre and The Winter’s Tale’ (M.Phil. diss., University of Oxford, 2002), 63–8.
Milton’s sonnet XIX likewise connects the Alcestis story with the Christian associations
of ‘Jove’s great son’: John Milton, Complete Shorter Poems, ed. John Carey, 2nd edn.
(London: Longman, 1997), 348.
Conclusion 187
the on-stage audience but also, and almost uniquely in Shakespeare, for
the theatre audience too. Shakespeare preserves Paulina’s secret, and the
biblical connection, alluding to a real return from the dead, deepens the
theatrical mystification of the moment. There is no theological relation
between Hermione and Jesus, but in a culture in which the primary
myth of faith centred on someone rising again, Shakespeare’s scene is
parasitic upon the wonder that the Resurrection generates.
Throughout Shakespeare’s career he was influenced by both the Bible
and biblical drama. Shakespeare’s knowledge of the Bible influenced
the verbal texture of his work, and the memory of the mystery cycles
affected the scenic structure of his plays. The allusive relations that
he created with these religious texts were, however, flexible and open-
ended. They allowed a connection between the secular play and sacred
narrative which enhanced the story Shakespeare is telling, rather than
subordinating it.
In The Winter’s Tale it is the staging of the moment, even more than
the words, which creates the affective power of the scene. The specific
memory of the mysteries seems to be awakened in the dramatist at
precisely these moments of powerful visual theatre—the near-blinding
of Arthur, the reappearance of Claudio, the convergence of Romeo and
the Friar on Juliet’s tomb—moments when it is what is seen, rather
than what is spoken which is fundamentally important. As Emrys Jones
has argued, at such moments, ‘Shakespeare has invented something—a
structure, an occasion—which may be said to be (however dangerous
the phrase) independent of the words which are usually thought to
give the scene its realization. This ‘‘something’’ we may call a ‘‘scenic
form’’.’⁹ Shakespeare’s masterly construction of some of his most
powerful scenes—Macbeth’s banquet, the blinding of Gloucester, the
night before Agincourt—draws on the stagecraft of the mystery plays,
and these deep allusions to the structure of the biblical drama show
that Shakespeare did not consider his memory of them as an unusual
or private thing, but as a shared consciousness of a theatrical past, a
heritage which could be drawn on and which would bring with it some
of the richness of earlier English theatre.
The religious context of Shakespeare’s plays includes vestigial traces
of Catholicism’s visual emphasis—in the mystery plays, liturgy, and
church decoration—but it also centres on the rich verbal stimulus of
Protestantism’s focus on the Word. Shakespeare’s theatrical medium
⁹ Emrys Jones, Scenic Form in Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), 3.
188 Conclusion
meant that he was able to embrace both these aspects and engage
with both aural and visual modes of communicating stories, ideas,
and emotions. Only once we have come to recognize the influence
of competing strands of Christianity on theatrical presentation in
this period will we understand how religion was assimilated into the
ostensibly secular drama of early-modern England.
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Index
Andrewes, Lancelot 22, 83, 111, 130, and versions of 21–2

134, 139, 175–6, 178 and widespread knowledge of 11, 18
Aristotle: Billington, Sandra 110
and thwarting of expectation 67 Bilson, Thomas 137–8, 154–5
and unity of action 43–4, 48 Birde, William 17
As You Like It, and Catholic Bishops’ Bible (1568) 21–2
references 29 Black, James 24
Ascham, Roger 45 Blayney, Peter 70
Ashton, Thomas 16–17, 35 Boulton, Jeremy 31
Atonement: Brooke, Arthur 61
and ‘guiler beguiled’ model of 126, Bucer, Martin 15
128, 135
and Henry IV, Part 1 121, 128,
Calvin, John 137, 138, 163
133–4, 152
Careless, John 37
and mystery plays 128–9
Carleton, Dudley 160, 161–2
Aylesbury, Thomas 26
catechisms 13–14
Catholicism:
Bains, Yaship 71 and assimilation of 33
Bale, John 15, 93, 94, 95, 177 and continued affection for 28–9
and God’s Promises 15–16, 54 and persistence of pre-Reformation
and harrowing of hell 137 Catholicism 26–7
and John the Baptist’s Preaching 54 and references in contemporary
and King Johan 90, 99 literature 30–1
Balsall, Dean Thomas 84–5 as religion of the eye 59
Barber, C. L. 56 and residual Catholicism 27, 32
Barnes, Barnaby 30–1 and Shakespeare:
Barton, John 100–1 engagement with 32–3
Battenhouse, Roy 110 references to 29–30, 31
Beard, Thomas, and Theatre of God’s and theatre 56–8
Judgements 16 and visual splendour 57
Beckwith, Sarah 57 censorship:
bedding: and impact on use of language 21
and Romeo and Juliet 82–3 and outlawing of Christian drama 20
and sepulchre in Tudor and theatre 16, 20–1
England 83–4 Censorship Commission 20
Bèze, Theodore de 15, 22 Chester mystery play cycle 33–4
and Abraham’s Sacrifice 17 see also mystery plays
Bible: Chettle, Henry 17
and associations of biblical Cheyne, John 84
language 23–4 church attendance 11–12
as dramatic source 15–18, 25 Churchyard, Thomas 17
Protestant drama 19 Clarke, Cecil 176
and religious instruction 12–16 Clopper, Lawrence 34, 38
and Shakespeare: Coghill, Nevill 72, 172, 173–4, 179
allusions to 10–11, 23–5 Collinson, Patrick 31
knowledge of 21–3 Cooper, Helen 52
224 Index
Cooper, Helen (cont.) and mystery plays 46–7
and embodied action 53–4 and plot structure 48–9
Corpus Christi festival 34–6 and presentation of violence 49–50
and Incarnation 51–2 and romance 45–6
and mystery plays 50–1 and separation of rank 46–7
see also mystery plays and sub-plots 48
Coventry mystery cycle 36–9 and unities of time and place 43–4
see also mystery plays and verbal drama 53, 54
Cox, John D. 42, 47 and violation of classical
Cranach, Lucas 111 prescriptions 43–9
Cranmer, Thomas 78 Duffy, Eamon 31, 32
Cressy, David 12, 33 Dugdale, Sir William 38
Crockett, Bryan 13 Duncan-Jones, Katherine 71
Crucifixion:
and Henry V 149–50
and mystery plays 63–4 Easter:
gambling soldiers 150 and paschal motif in Romeo and
release of doves 64 Juliet 7, 61
Cymbeline, and Catholic references 29 changes in time 75–6
cock crow 75–7
Juliet’s death 65
Dawson, Anthony 58, 59 Juliet’s infancy 62–5
death, and Romeo and Juliet 66 Juliet’s tomb 80–2
comedic use of 60, 66–7 Juliet’s tomb as bed 82–3, 85
elasticity of 60 light imagery 80–1
Juliet’s tomb 80–2 nurse’s anecdote 63–5
as bed 82–3, 85 Romeo’s dream 68
pre-echoes of 64–5 use of sepulchre 77, 80–3
Dee, John 123 variations in First and Second
Dekker, Thomas 17 Quartos 61–2, 72
Dickens, A. G. 27 and sepulchre in Tudor
Diehl, Huston 58 England 77–80
disguised rulers 168–71 education, and Protestant
and Measure for Measure 171–4 evangelism 12, 13–14
temptation in the desert Edwardian Injunctions (1547) 2
allusions 174–80 Eedes, Richard 154–5
and Prince/King Henry 126–7 Elizabeth I 55
divine right/divinity: and comparison to Christ 91–2
and disguised ruler 167–70 and cult of virgin queen 91
and justice and mercy 160–1 and death of 92
and King John 89 and use of religious imagery 120
and Measure for Measure 7–8, 155, and visibility of 166–7
161, 182 Elton, W. R. 158–9
and mystery of state 166–7 embodied action 53–4
and Richard II 125 and idolatry 54–5
and royalty 89, 90, 93, 127–8 Empson, William 49
Donaldson, Peter 81 Erne, Lucas 70
Donne, John 31, 73
doves, in mystery plays 64
dramatic theory: Flower Portrait 5–6
and comedy 85–6 Foxe, John 14, 90, 94, 97, 109, 131
and embodied action 53–5 and Actes and Monuments 14, 91–2,
and Incarnational aesthetic 51–2 98
and Jonson 44–5 death of John 99–100
Index 225
and Christ Jesus Triumphant 15, 136 as father figure 132
and theatre as didactic tool 15 Lenten imagery 129–31
funeral rites, and Hamlet 3–4 postpones Hal’s rebirth 145
Puritan idiom 131–2
and Gethsemane 132
Garter, Thomas 17 and Hal:
Garyngton, John 80–1 allusions to Isaiah 133–4
Geneva New Testament 22 calculated use of religious
Gethsemane: language 122, 125
and Henry IV, Part 1 132 comparison with Christ 127,
and Henry V 147–9 142
Gibson, Gail McMurray 51, 52 failure to recognize in
Gospel of Nicodemus 134–5 battle 144–5
Gosson, Stephen 54, 55 Falstaff ’s failure to
Grafton, Richard 94 understand 129
Greenblatt, Stephen 30, 56 freeing of prisoner 140
Greene, Robert 17 Incarnational allusions 126
Gregory of Nyssa 128, 175 masking of nobility 127
Greville, Fulke 16 reconciliation with his
Grindal, Archbishop 34 father 132–3
Guthrie, Tyrone 176 redemption 121–2
resurrection postponed 145
Hackett, Helen 30, 91 strategy of 122, 129
Haigh, Christopher 32 twin-natured kingship 127–8
Halio, Jay 71 use of disguises 126–7
Hamlet: victory over Hotspur 129, 139,
and biblical allusions 24 142
and funeral rites 3–4 and harrowing of hell 152
and influence of mystery plays 40 and holy monarchy 122
Hampton Court Conference 156 and Hotspur:
Happé, Peter 48 failure to understand Hal 143–4
Harington, Sir John 160 Hal’s victory over 129, 142
harrowing of hell 134–6 linked to Lucifer 139–40
and debate over doctrine 137–8 medieval characterization of
and freeing of souls 140 evil 141
and Henry IV, Part 1 152 nobility of 141
and mystery plays 134–5, 142–3, retention of prisoners 141–2
145 and Lenten imagery 129–31
and questioning of champion’s and redemption 121–2
identity 144–5 and religious iconography 7
and Spenser’s use of imagery and sub-plots 48
of 138–9 and tavern scenes 129
and visual representations of 136–7 and use of sepulchre 77
Hatfield, Elizabeth 84 see also harrowing of hell
Haughton, William 17 Henry IV, Part 2 126
Hazlitt, William 109 Henry V 121
Henry IV, Part 1 and Agincourt:
and Atonement 128 absence of sacrifice 150–1
allusions to Isaiah 133–4 gambling French soldiers 150
guiler beguiled theory 128 Henry on eve of 147–9
and Christ’s temptation 128–30 as secular Crucifixion 149–50
and Falstaff: singing of Te Deum 151
failure to understand Hal 129 and allusions to Gethsemane 147–9
226 Index
Henry V (cont.) Jacob and Esau (1568) 19
and Dauphin’s underestimation of James I (VI of Scotland) 92
Henry 146–7 and disguised ruler 167–8
and influence of mystery plays 40 and flattery 162
and King Henry: Middleton’s The Phoenix 168–70
in disguise 127 and justice and mercy:
on eve of Agincourt 147–9 capricious approach to 159–60
hypocrisy of 146 divine aspects of 160–1
illusion of divinity 153 as giver of life 161–2
as perfect ruler 145–6 reprieve of Bye plot
reinvests monarchy with conspirators 160, 161
divinity 146 summary execution 159
resurrection 145 and Measure for Measure 154
singing of Te Deum 151 oblique criticism in 159
and structure of 146 similarities with the Duke 159
and Wars of the Roses 152–3 and mystery of state 166–7
Henry VI, Part 2, and influence of and Puritan hopes of 156
mystery plays 42 and revelation 181
Henry VI, Part 3 and secrecy 166, 167
and influence of mystery plays 40, 42 and slander 179
and ‘measure for measure’ 183 John, King:
Henry VIII 94, 96, 97–8, 151 and crowned on Ascension Day 92
Henslowe’s Diary 17 and death of, religious
Heywood, John 37 comparisons 98–100
Hill, Adam 137 and divinity 89
Hoby, Lady Margaret 14 and portrayal of 89, 93–4
Holinshed, Raphael 94, 109, 151 compared to David 95–6
Holt, J. C. 92 prophecy of 95, 97–8
Hooker, Richard 22 see also King John
Hume, Alexander 137 Jones, Emrys 39, 124, 187
Hutton, Dean of York 55 Jones, John 75
Hutton, Ronald 33 Jonson, Ben:
and Every Man in his Humour 44
and The Magnetic Lady 44
idolatry: and satire of theatre 44–5
and embodied action 54–5
and mystery plays 55
and theatre 55 Kerrigan, John 62
illiteracy 15 King John:
Incarnation: and Arthur:
and Henry IV, Part 1 126 allusions to Isaac’s
and Incarnational aesthetic 51–2 sacrifice 110–11
and Measure for Measure 171–4 association with Richard I 104
and mystery plays 41, 46, 47, 50 binding of 115–16
and visual arts 52 centrality of 102–3
infidelity, and mystery plays 42–3 claims God’s sanction 106–7
Ingram, Martin 39 death of 108–9
Innocent III, Pope 93 describes himself as a
Ioppolo, Grace 62, 71 lamb 112–13
Isaac: desire for life 114
and allusions in King John 110–11 desire for paternal love 114
and blindfolding of 116–17 helplessness of 115
and mystery plays 113–14, 115 innocence of 110, 115, 118, 119
Index 227
as locus for holiness 90–1, 102, and growth of 36
120 and mystery plays 36
near-blinding of 90, 110, Love’s Labour’s Lost, and biblical
118–19, 120 allusions 10
portrayal of 89 Lurhman, Baz 81
portrayed as child 109–10, 115 Luther, Martin 136
wishes to be a shepherd 113
and baron’s revolt 103, 108 Macbeth:
and Christian imagery 7 and biblical allusions 24
and Constance, augmentation of role and influence of mystery plays 42
of 103–4 Machiavelli, Niccolò 125–6
and heavenly portents 107–8 Machyn, Henry 1, 36
and King John: MacLean, Sally-Beth 19, 96
human power 107 McMillin, Scott 19, 96
moral deterioration of 106 Madden, John 60
orders Arthur’s death 106 Maguire, Laurie 70
portrayal of 90 Malone, Edward 28, 32
reduced religious significance Marlow, Richard 35
of 100–2 Marlowe, Christopher, and
weakness of 104–6 Edward II 124–5
and monk’s death 100 Marotti, Arthur F 32–3
and mystery plays, influence Marprelate, Martin 19–20, 137
of 110–11, 119–20 Marrow, James 118
and softening of anti-Catholic Martin, Roger 79
rhetoric 100 Mather, Samuel 113
see also John, King; Troublesome Measure for Measure:
Raigne of King John (1591) and Angelo 155
King Lear: conflation of human and divine
and biblical allusions 24–5 law 156–7
and blinding of Gloucester 117 fall of 157–8
and influence of mystery plays 42 integrity of 157
and biblical allusions 157
Lake, Peter 155–6, 157 and Claudio:
Lambarde, William 59 arrest of 157
Langland, William, and Piers relationship with death 164–5
Plowman 135, 140, 141, 145 return as raising of Lazarus 162–6
Larkin, Philip 1 and comedic impulse of 180
Last Judgement, and Measure for and conflation of human and divine
Measure 181 law 155
Lateran Council (1215) 51 and divine rule 7–8, 155
Latimer, Hugh 26 ideal of kingship 161
Laxton, Basilla 84 impossibility of 182
Lazarus: and the Duke 155
and allusions in Measure for attempt to stage a ‘Last
Measure 162–6 Judgement’ 181
and mystery plays 162, 163, 164, damaged self-esteem 180
165 as giver of life 165
Lent, and Henry IV, Part 1 129–31 imperfect imitation of Christ 166,
Leo the Great, Pope 128 180–1
Levin, Carole 101 Incarnational allusions 171–4
literacy 12 Lucio’s slanders 179
Lodge, Thomas 17 mercy of 158
London: mystery of state 166
228 Index
Measure for Measure: (cont.) and harrowing of hell 134–5,
policy of non-explanation 161 142–3, 145
quasi-divine attributes 162 and idolatry 55
similarities with James I 159 and Incarnation 41, 46, 47, 50
temptation in the desert and infidelity 42–3
allusions 174–80 and Isaac:
and godly rule, critique of 155–6, blindfolding of 116–17
183 Isaac’s sacrifice 111–12, 113–14,
and James I 154 115
oblique criticism of 159 and King John, influence
and justice and mercy 157, 182–3 on 110–11, 119–20
uneven application of 158 in London 36
and legal audience of 158–9 and mixing of ranks 46–7
and Lucio 181 and presentation of violence 49–50
character of 178 and Protestant reworking of 15–16
as devil 176–8 and raising of Lazarus 162, 163,
slander 179 164, 165
temptation in the desert and royalty 96–7
allusions 174–80 and secret Passion 117–18
and Mistress Overdone 158 and Shakespeare 36–7, 39–43, 47,
and origin of title 182 187
and silences in 164 and suffering 50
and sources for 47, 170–1 and survival of:
Merchant of Venice, The Elizabethan period 33–5
and biblical allusions 23 Jacobean period 35–6
and Catholic references 29 and Te Deum 151
Merry Wives of Windsor, The: and temptation of Christ 175, 177,
and biblical allusions 23 179–80
and influence of mystery plays 40 and torture of Christ 116
meta-theatricality 58–9
Middleton, Thomas, and The Nashe, Thomas 19, 130, 168
Phoenix 168–70 Noli me tangere, and The Winter’s
Midsummer Night’s Dream, A 60 Tale 185–6
and Catholic references 29 Norbrook, David 91
and comedy 86 Norman, Marc 60
Milward, Peter 29 Nuttal, A. D. 158, 172
Montrose, Louis 57
More, Sir Thomas 45
Morey, James 99, 100, 101 O’Connell, Michael 41, 51, 184–5
Munday, Anthony 2–3, 4, 17 and presentation of violence 50
Mutschmann, H. 32 and theatrical spectacle 58–9
mystery plays: Ong, Walter 8
and Atonement 128–9 Ordo Prophetarum 96–7, 98
and Christ’s crucifixion 63–4
gambling soldiers 150 pagan religion, and theatrical use
release of doves 64 of 20–1
and Corpus Christi festival 50–1 Paget, Eusebius 14
and Coventry mystery cycle 36–9 pain, and inexpressibility of 49–50
and doves in 64 Painter, William 61
and dramatic theory 46–7 Paris, Matthew 93, 94–5
and Elizabethan theatre 43 Passion plays, and Protestant staging
and embodied action 53–5 of 16–17
and Gethsemane 147, 148 Patterson, Annabel 21
Index 229
Peele, George 17–18 and The Winter’s Tale 184–7
Pericles 45 Richard II :
Perkins, William 174–5 and biblical allusions 24
Phillips, Robin 174 and divine right 125
plot structure 48–9 and influence of mystery plays 41
Poole, Kirsten 130–1 and political ineptitude 125
Pope, Elizabeth 183 and self-comparison with
Porter, Isabel 26 Christ 123–4, 125
preaching, and popularity of 13 and sources for:
Prophets’ Plays, The 96–7, 98 French chronicles 123
Protestantism 6 Marlowe’s Edward II 124–5
and catechisms 13–14 and use of sepulchre 77
and preaching 13 Robinson, J. W. 117–18
and Protestant drama 19 Roger of Wendover 93, 109
as religion of the ear 59 Rogerson, Margaret 38
as religion of the Word 12 Rolle, Richard 64
and religious education 12–13 romance 45–6
and theatre: Romeo and Juliet 80–1
engagement with 58 and comedy:
hostility towards 52–3, 55–6 death 60, 66–7
impact on 56–7 dramatic theory 85–6
verbal drama 54 expectations of 86
see also religious instruction Juliet 63, 67
Prynne, William 13, 36 nurse’s tardiness 65–6
psalm-singing 14 tragic use of 67
Puritans: variations in First and Second
and harrowing of hell 137 Quartos 61–2, 86–8
and James I 156 and death 66
and Lent 131 comedic use of 60, 66–7
and theatre 55–6 elasticity of 60
Juliet’s tomb 80–2
Juliet’s tomb as bed 82–3, 85
Queen’s Men 19 pre-echoes of 64–5
and liturgical year references
Ralph of Coggeshall 93 72–3
Randolph, Thomas, and The Muses and opposition of youth and
Looking-Glass 55–6 age 65–6
Rankins, William 53 and paschal motif 7, 61
Rape of Lucrece, The 83 changes in time 75–6
Reformation: cock crow 75–7
and destruction of rood-lofts 1–3 Juliet’s death 65
and printed word 8–9 Juliet’s infancy 62–5
religious conformity 12 Juliet’s tomb 80–2
religious instruction: Juliet’s tomb as bed 82–3, 85
and catechisms 13–14 light imagery 80–1
and cheap religious print 14–15 nurse’s anecdote 63–5
and literacy 12 Romeo’s dream 68
and psalm-singing 14 use of sepulchre 77, 80–3
and sermons 13 variations in First and Second
and theatre 15–16 Quartos 61–2, 72
and visual culture 14 and religious language 68–70
resurrection: and sources for 61
and Henry V 145 and thwarting of expectation 67
230 Index
Romeo and Juliet (cont.) and dramatic theory:
and variations in First and Second mixing of ranks 47
Quartos 61–2 presentation of violence 49–50
comedy 86–8 sub-plots 48
curtaining of Juliet’s body 81–2 and Flower Portrait 5–6
Easter motif 72 and harmonization of visual and
explanations of 71–2 aural 59
Juliet’s characterization 73–4 and mystery plays 36–7, 39–43, 47,
Juliet’s treatment by parents 75 187
number changes 75–7 and Protestantism 6
old age 66 and religious context of plays 187–8
proposed marriage of Juliet and and scenic form 187
Paris 74–5 see also entries for individual plays
Shakespeare’s intentions 62 Sharpe, Kevin 159
status of First Quarto 70–1 Shaw, John 35
use of sepulchre 77, 80–3 Shuger, Debora 47
rood-lofts 1–3 Sider, John 104
Rowley, Samuel 17 Sidney, Philip 16, 18
royalty: and dramatic theory 46
and divine right 93 Sims, James 152
and divinity 89, 90, 127–8 Sir Thomas More (Munday et al) 2–3
see also divine right/divinity slander:
Rubin, Miri 79 and James I 179
Ryan, Patrick 124 and temptation of Christ 178–9
Snyder, Susan 24, 66–7, 86, 87
St Gregory of Nazianzus 54, 55 Southwell, Robert 76
Sams, Eric 32 Sparke, Thomas 13
Samson 117–18 Spenser, Edmund 31, 138–9
Scarisbrick, J. J. 32 Stonor, Cecily 26
Scarry, Elaine 49–50 Stoppard, Tom 60
Scoufos, Alice 130 Stow, John 123
Seddon, John 13 suffering 49–50
Seneca 49, 53
sepulchre: Taunton, Nina 148–9
and bedding 83–4 Taylor, Gary 62
in Romeo and Juliet 77, 80–3 Taylor, John 131
and Shakespeare’s references to 77 temptation in the desert:
in Tudor England 77–80 and Henry IV, Part 1 128–30
sermons, and popularity of 13 and Measure for Measure 174–9
Shaheen, Naseeb 22 and mystery plays 175, 177, 179–80
Shakespeare, John 1–2 and slander 178–9
and financial difficulties 28 theatre 16–17
and recusancy 27–8 and anti-Catholicism 52–3
and Spiritual Last Will and and assimilation of Catholic
Testament 28 practice 33
Shakespeare, William: and biblically based drama 16–18
and Bible: and Catholicism 56–8
allusions to 10–11, 23–5, 187 and censorship 16, 20–1
knowledge of 21–3 and characteristics of 59
and Catholicism: and the disguised ruler 167, 168–71
nature of engagement with 32–3 and dramatic theory 43–4
personal beliefs 4–5, 6, 27, 31–2 comedy 85–6
references to 29–30, 31 Jonson’s satire 44–5
Index 231
mystery plays 46–7 and John’s prophecy 95, 97–8
plot structure 48–9 and portrayal of John 94, 100, 105,
presentation of violence 49–50 107
romance 45–6 compared to David 95–6
separation of rank 46–7 Jesse tree 96
sub-plots 48 and Richard I 104
violation of classical see also King John
prescriptions 43–9 Twelfth Night, and Catholic
and embodied action 53–5 references 29
and idolatry 54–5 Tyndale, William 93
and Incarnational aesthetic 51–2
and late-Elizabethan hostility to 53 Urban IV, Pope 51
and Martin Marprelate Urkowitz, Steven 71, 74–5
controversy 19–20
and meta-theatricality 58–9
and mystery plays 43 vestments, and theatrical use of 56–7
and outlawing of Christian drama Vices 177–8
20 violence, and presentation on
and Protestantism: stage 49–50
engagement with 58 visual culture, and religious
hostility of 52–3, 55–6 instruction 14
impact of 56–7
Protestant drama 19 Wager, Lewis 17
and religious instruction 15 Walsham, Alexandra 32, 33
and use of pagan religion 20–1 Warren, Michael 62
and use of vestments 56–7 Wars of the Roses 152–3
and verbal drama 53, 54 Watt, Tessa 14, 33
and visual splendour 57 Weever, John 35–6
see also mystery plays Weldon, Anthony 167
Thomson, Peter 101 Wenterdorf, K. 32
Tomson, Laurence 22 Whetstone, George 46–7
Tomson New Testament 22 and Promos and Cassandra 46–7,
transubstantiation 51 170–1
Troilus and Cressida 158–9 Wickham, Glynne 42, 56, 57
and Catholic references 29 Wilkinson, Gregory 26
Troublesome Raigne of King John Williams, Arnold 176
(1591) 90, 93 Willyams, Henry 83–4
and Arthur 103 Wilson, Richard 29, 30, 32
age of 109 Winter’s Tale, The, resurrection and the
death of 114 statue scene 184–7
and death of John 108 Womack, Peter 45
and heavenly portents 107 Woolf, Rosemary 115

Beatrice Groves - Texts and Traditions - Religion in Shakespeare 1592-1604 (Oxford English Monographs) (2007)

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OXF O R D E N G L I S H M O N O G R A PH S

CLARENDON PRESS · OXFORD

ISBN 0–19–920898–0 978–0–19–920898–2

In the late seventeenth century Richard Davies, Archdeacon of Coventry,

To Larkin, in 1954, rood-lofts (carved wooden balconies which sur-

³ S. Schoenbaum, William Shakespeare: A Documentary Life (Oxford: Oxford Univer-

¹⁰ Peter Milward, The Catholicism of Shakespeare’s Plays (Curdridge: Saint Austin,

¹² Richard Wilson, ‘‘Introduction: A Torturing Hour—Shakespeare and the Martyrs’,

⁷ Martin Ingram, ‘From Reformation to Toleration: Popular Religious Culture in

¹⁵ Stephen Denison, A Compendious Catechisme: Wherein are brieﬂy expounded,

²⁵ J. Alan B. Somerset, ed., Shropshire, Records of Early English Drama (Toronto:

Protestant doctrine, however, might inﬂuence drama in more subtle

⁴² See Noble, Shakespeare’s Biblical Knowledge, 64–76; Naseeb Shaheen, Biblical

In the Elizabethan period Protestants and Catholics alike believed that

⁴ A. G. Dickens, ‘The First Stages of Romanist Recusancy in Yorkshire, 1560–1590’,

⁹ Walsham, Church Papists, 91; see also 11–12.

²³ Arthur F. Marotti, ‘Shakespeare and Catholicism’, in Richard Dutton, Alison Find-

²⁵ Barbara D. Palmer, ‘Recycling ‘‘The Wakeﬁeld Cycle’’: The Records’, Research

³⁰ Peter Greenﬁeld, ‘Regional Performance in Shakespeare’s Time’, in Alison Findlay,

³³ John Weever, Ancient Fvnerall Monvments […] (London, 1631), Mm5r .

³⁷ R. W. Ingram, ed., Coventry, Records of Early English Drama (Manchester:

⁵² Shaheen, Biblical References in Shakespeare’s Plays, 335–6. This expression is linked

⁵⁹ Michael O’Connell, ‘Vital Cultural Practices’, 161–2.

⁶⁵ Ben Jonson, vi. 492.

⁷¹ Geoffrey Bullough, ed., Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare (London:

⁷⁷ William Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966),

⁹⁰ Jonas Barish, The Antitheatrical Prejudice (Berkeley: University of California Press,

⁹³ Cooper, ‘Shakespeare and the Mystery Plays’, 20.

¹⁰¹ Thomas Randolph, The Muses Looking-Glasse (London, 1638), A3v .

¹¹⁴ O’Connell, The Idolatrous Eye, 143–4.

In John Madden’s ﬁlm Shakespeare in Love the hero is writing a comedy

⁷ Nevill Coghill, Shakespeare’s Professional Skills (Cambridge: Cambridge University

²⁰ Snyder, Comic Matrix, 62.

²⁵ For a recent discussion of Romeo and Juliet’s language of ‘incarnate spirituality’

³⁰ Sims, Dramatic Uses of Biblical Allusions, 46.

⁴⁴ Steven Urkowitz, ‘Five Women Eleven Ways: Changing Images of Shakespearean

⁵² Hutton, Rise and Fall of Merry England, 52–3.

⁷⁴ Lancelot Andrewes, XCVI Sermons (London, 1629), Nn3v .

⁷⁶ R. M. Serjeantson and H. Isham Longden, ‘The Parish Churches and Religious

⁸¹ Davidson, Early Art of Coventry, 63–8.

⁸⁴ Herrick, Comic Theory, 59.

⁵ Hackett, Virgin Mother, 5, 80.

¹³ William Tyndale, The Obedience of Christian Man, in Doctrinal Treatises and

¹⁷ McMillin and MacLean, The Queen’s Men, 157–8.

²³ Brawer, ‘Form and Function’, 89.

²⁶ Levin, ‘The Historical Evolution’, 87.

³² Quoted in Geraldine Cousin, King John, Shakespeare in Performance (Manchester:

³⁶ S. C. Sen Gupta, Shakespeare’s Historical Plays (Oxford: Oxford University Press,

³⁹ See Carol J. Carlisle, ‘Constance: A Theatrical Trinity’, in Deborah T. Curren-

The word ‘keeper’ was suggested to Shakespeare by The Troublesome

⁴¹ See Shaheen, Biblical References in Shakespeare’s Plays, 400–1.

⁵⁸ Chambers, Mediaeval Stage, ii. 364.

Arthur’s promises of silence and forgiveness recall the dumb lamb of

The dissolving resolve dramatized in Isaac’s response is expressed in

⁶¹ Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources, iv. 57–8.

⁷¹ J. W. Robinson, Studies in Fifteenth-century Stagecraft (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Medieval

² Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources, iv. 302.

In his deposition scene he tells the onlookers:

Although there is little of such language in Shakespeare’s primary sources,

⁸ William A. Armstrong, Elizabethan History Plays (London: Oxford University Press,

¹⁰ Peter S. Donaldson, Machiavelli and the Mystery of State (Cambridge: Cambridge

¹⁶ See Anne Barton, Essays, Mainly Shakespearean (Cambridge: Cambridge University

²⁰ See J. Dover Wilson, The Fortunes of Falstaff (Cambridge: Cambridge University