Texts and Traditions Religion in Shakespeare 1592-1604 [Hardcover]

Texts and Traditionsexplores Shakespeare's thoroughgoing engagement with the religious culture of his time. In the wake of the recent resurgence of interest in Shakespeare's Catholicism, Groves eschews a reductively biographical approach and considers instead the ways in which Shakespeare's borrowing from both the visual culture of Catholicism and the linguistic wealth of the Protestant English Bible enriched his drama. Through close readings of a number of plays--Romeo and Juliet,King John,1 Henry IV,Henry V ,andMeasure for Measure--Groves unearths and explains previously unrecognized allusions to the Bible, the Church's liturgy, and to the mystery plays performed in England in Shakespeare's boyhood.Texts and Traditionsprovides new evidence of the way in which Shakespeare exploited his audience's cultural memory and biblical knowledge in order to enrich his ostensibly secular drama and argues that we need to unravel the interpretative possibilities of these religious nuances in order fully to grasp the implications of his plays.

Introduction
1. Drama and the Word: The Bible on the early modern stage
2. Shakespeare's incarnational aesthetic: The mystery plays and Catholicism
3. Comedic form and paschal motif in the first and second quartos of Romeo and Juliet
4. 'I am not he shall buyld the Lord a house': Religious imagery and the succession to the English throne in King John
5. : 'Covering discretion with a coat of folly': The redemptive self-fashioning of Hal
6. 'Usurp the beggary he was never born to': Measure for Measure and the questioning of divine kingship
Conclusion

Beatrice Groves is the Junior Research Fellow in Humanities at Wolfson College, Oxford.