The Pauline Renaissance: A Shakespearean Reassessment

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Notes

1. My heartfelt thanks to John S. Coolidge, Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, for corresponding with me on the legacy of his work. On the religious turn in Renaissance studies, see especially Arthur F. Marotti and Ken Jackson, “The Turn to Religion in Early Modern English Studies,” Criticism 46.1 (Winter 2004): 167–90; Bruce Holsinger, ed., Literary History and the Religious Turn, special issue of English Language Notes, 44.1 (Summer 2006); Ewan Fernie, ed., Spiritual Shakespeares (London: Routledge, 2005); and Graham Hammill and Julia Reinhard Lupton, eds., “Sovereigns, Citizens, and Saints,” special issue of Religion and Literature, 38.3 (Autumn 2006).

2. For Coolidge, Paul “emphatically does not consider that the Christian community, created by the present work of the Spirit, supersedes the historical people of God, existing by and for the temporal transmission of God's promise” (149).

3. The classic Christian-typological reading of The Merchant of Venice is Barbara Lewalski, “Biblical Allusion and Allegory in The Merchant of Venice,” Shakespeare Quarterly 13 (1962): 327–42.

4. Thus Coolidge cites as a prooftext for the play the Geneva gloss of Luke 13.24–30: “Christ cutteth off the vain confidence of the Jews” (249).

5. Key statements include Leslie Fiedler, The Stranger in Shakespeare (New York: Stein & Day, 1972); Stephen Greenblatt, “Marlowe, Marx, and Anti-Semitism,” Critical Inquiry 5.2 (Winter 1978): 291–307; James Shapiro, Shakespeare and the Jews (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996); and Janet Adelman, Blood Relations: Christian and Jew in “The Merchant of Venice” (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2008).

6. Key contributions to this movement include W. D. Davies, Paul and Rabbinic Judaism: Some Rabbinic Elements in Pauline Theology (London: S.P.C.K., 1955); E. P. Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism: A Comparison of Patterns of Religion (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1977); Daniel Boyarin, A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994); Jacob Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004); and Paula Fredriksen, Augustine and the Jews: A Christian Defense of Jews and Judaism (New York: Doubleday, 2008). Steven Mailloux is also working on the rhetorical dimensions of Paul, with an emphasis on receptions in nineteenth-century America, but with a sense of the long durée (and Catholic dimensions) of this story. See “Political Theology in Douglass and Melville,” in Frederick Douglass and Herman Melville: Essays in Relation, ed. Robert Levine and Samuel Otter (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 159–80.

7. Hamlet, ed. T. J. B. Spencer (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980).

8. Alain Badiou, St. Paul, 13. In addition to his book on Paul, Badiou has also written a play based on Paul's life, entitled Incident at Antioch (unpublished, 1982). The play was the subject of a recent symposium held at the University of Glasgow entitled “Paul, Political Fidelity and the Philosophy of Alain Badiou: A Discussion of the Incident at Antioch.” Badiou has also published an intentionally controversial set of writings on “the word Jew” and the state of Israel, collected in Polemics, trans. Steve Corcoran (London: Verso, 2006).

9. “It is of the essence of faith to declare itself publicly. Truth is either militant or is not.” Badiou, St. Paul, 88.

10. Ken Jackson, “‘Is It God or Sovereign Exception?’: Giorgio Agamben's Homo Sacer and Shakespeare's King John,” Religion and Literature 38.3 (Autumn 2006): 85–100; Lowell Gallagher, “Waiting for Gobbo,” in Spiritual Shakespeares, 73–93; Kathleen Biddick, “Unbinding the Flesh in the Time That Remains: Crusader Martyrdom Then and Now,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 13.2 (2007): 197–225; Jonathan Gil Harris, Untimely Matters in the Time of Shakespeare (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009); Jennifer Rust, Imagining the Theo-Political Body in Early Modern English Literature (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Irvine, 2007); Randall Martin, “Shakespearian Biography, Biblical Allusion, and Early Modern Practices of Reading Scripture,” forthcoming in Shakespeare Survey, 2010.

11. Jennifer Rust's work is evolving into an analysis of Catholic and Protestant contests in Renaissance literature, with a strong Pauline element running through her analyses of the corporate social body or corpus mysticum. Randall Martin and Gregory Kneidel are more concerned with Protestant controversies and Scriptural culture. On Paul and Islam, see Jane Hwang Degenhardt, Seduction, Resistance, and Redemption: Staging the Threat of Islamic Conversion (University of Edinburgh Press, 2010), forthcoming, as well as my own essay, “Othello Circumcised: Shakespeare and the Pauline Discourse of Nations,” Representations 57 (1997): 73–89.