Part 7
The Biblical Presence in Shakespeare, Milton, and Blake: A Comparative Study
The Biblical Presence in Shakespeare, Milton, and Blake: A Comparative Study. By Harold Fisch. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999. Pp. xiv + 331. $80.00 cloth.
This immensely learned, wide-ranging book by last year's recipient of the Israel Prize blurs distinctions between artistic creation (poetics) and interpretation (hermeneutics) by involving both in a dialogue with an authority that paradoxically constrains and frees. This encounter, which Harold Fisch calls "covenantal hermeneutics" (159), is easiest to find in Milton, where the bard of Paradise Lost,following the voice of the muse Urania, soars "above the flight of Pegasean wing" (7.1-4); where the epic's Adam, like Abraham, Moses, and Job in the Bible, both submits to and expostulates with his author, God; and where Nazarite Samson acquires power by limiting himself: "Abstemious I grew up and thriv'd amain; / He led me on to mightiest deeds / Above the nerve of mortal arm" (Samson Agonistes,ll.637-39). In the great epic and tragedy, a productive tension is generated by the authority of the prior texts of Genesis 1-3 and Judges 13-16, respectively, and the openness of Milton's midrashic interpretations of those biblical passages. Fisch's best readings approximate the encounter between the commanding voices of what he calls "thethree poets" (vii) and an interpretive freedom that often chooses to measure them against the standard of his own reading of Scripture.
Fisch finds this dialogic relationship even in Shakespeare, where he sets Hamlet's revelational encounter with the ghost of his father (1.5) over against the Sinai theophany and the Israelites' entry into covenant with God (Exodus 19ff). Hamlet alludes to the two tables of the decalogue ("my table" [1.5.98]) and the commandment to honor one's parents when he declares, "thy commandment all alone shall live / Within the book and volume of my brain, / Unmixed with baser matter" (1.5.102-4). For Fisch the two principal ways of interpreting this scene remain perpetually unresolved. The first is to read it as an example of lex talionis,deriving from the genres of Greek and Roman literature and thus resembling other moments in Renaissance revenge tragedies. Another way is to see Hamlet willingly entering into a covenant with his father's authoritative spirit, embarking on "a voyage of self-discovery" (116); like Bunyan's Pilgrim, "he is the man with a burden on his back, a seeker after salvation" (116). [End Page 419]
Fisch makes things conspicuously difficult for himself by devoting the first 150 pages of his study of biblical influence to Shakespeare, who plunders his sources so thoroughly that there is no trace of them in his voice, and by beginning with two decidedly nonbiblical plays, Julius Caesarand Antony and Cleopatra. He concentrates on what he terms the met-agon,a struggle for control of the play between biblical and nonbiblical approaches to life and art. Practicing a sort of virtual hermeneutics, he claims that Shakespeare's first audience would have interpreted the actions of the pagan Roman world of Julius Caesarby the light of the Bible. Just as Pompey, dead before the play begins, is yet a presence opposing Caesar, who falls dead at his statue's feet, so is the absent Bible, implicitly opposed to the tragic ideal, present in the play.
Fisch expresses strong opinions. He points to the dangers of tragedy, pastoral, myth, pure aesthetics, closure, monologic discourse (including the narcissism implicit in lyric), the romantic imagination, and much more. Thinking of Frazer and Nietzsche rather than Freud, he finds two primal scenes in Shakespeare's Roman plays that take the audience back to the ritual beginnings of tragedy: the conspirators bathing themselves in Caesar's blood up to the elbows after having spoken of carving him up as a sacrifice to the gods (2.1.172-74; 3.1.105-7), a reenactment of the festival of Dionysus; and Cleopatra's death scene (5.2) as a ritual apotheosis, a dying and anticipated rebirth that parallels the story of Isis and Osiris. If Cleopatra is Venus, Antony is Bacchus/Dionysus. Against Agamemnon and Orestes, who believe in salvation by human sacrifice, Fisch sets verses from the Hebrew Bible such as Deuteronomy 21:7-8, which describe the ritual performed by the elders of the nearest town when an unknown corpse is found, in order to dispel the defilement and danger brought by death. Against myth that makes Antony either a god or a beast, Fisch cites a favorite text from Ezekiel that emphasizes the human, the desire that some divine hand will "take the stony heart out of their bodies, and will give them a heart of flesh" (11:19). The biblical asserts itself unexpectedly, even bizarrely, as when the Clown enters with his basket of figs and his malapropisms in Antony and Cleopatra "his biting is immortal; those that die of it do seldom or never recover" (5.2.246-48). This becomes an allusion to Isaiah's very last verse: "for their worm shall not die, neither shall their fire be quenched" (66:24). The night-terrors experienced by Casca and Brutus are compared with those in the account of Eliphaz the Temanite in the Book of Job (4:19): "But," Fisch concludes, "dust though they are, they are also liberated--if only for a moment--from the enclosed, monologic world of myth from which tragedy derives its form and compulsions and are granted 'a difficult freedom'" (34).
One can't help wondering whether or not Fisch, whose knowledge of the Hebrew and Greek Bibles is truly profound, would admit the New Testament into the canon. At times, such as in his discussion of the great reconciliation scene in King Lear(4.7), with its powerful freight of Christian theology, he can't avoid it. Still, even in that play, he opposes a Hebraic Gloucester subplot, modeled on the story of Isaac's blessing of his two sons, to the determined tragic fate of Lear and his daughters. Hebraic pilgrimage opposes Hellenic doom. Fisch's ambivalence toward the New Testament is apparent. He reads the Hebrew Bible metonymically as human life itself, and he finds the human in figures such as the Clown in Antony and Cleopatra,the Fool in Lear,Edgar when disguised as a Bedlam beggar (a figure more truly Jobean than Lear himself), the Porter in Macbeth,and the gravediggers in Hamlet The mythologies of Greece and Rome, however, "are built on the [End Page 420] negation of death, on the . . . dream of an immortal afterlife. . . . To face death without these seductions is, we may say, the beginning of wisdom of another, more human kind" (58). Does the New Testament's promise of an afterlife ally it with these pagan mythologies? Is the crucifixion a ritual of human sacrifice? (Christ willingly chooses to die; the animal sacrificed in the deuteronomic ritual privileged by Fisch doesn't.) Since Fisch's method of covenantal hermeneutics derives ultimately from the method of midrash aggadah in the Talmud which he cites very effectively, what of the dream of an afterlife there?
If, as Fisch suggests, Shakespeare's force is centrifugal, projected outward in order to construct an autonomous universe, and Blake's is mythic, annulling differences between world and self, then his own force is Miltonic and centripetal, pulling the world toward the subjective center. Such strong readings as his, with the scope that a large book affords, will inevitably provoke resistance. One wishes occasionally that his relationship with his own past work were more open and dialogic. In a section, written in the sixties, that relies heavily on Louis Martz's seminal work The Poetry of Meditation(1954), Fisch seems to be arguing that the plot of Hamletis merely a peg on which to hang the soliloquies (106ff). He also repeats the argument that the "mortal sin original" in Paradise Lostis a lapse rather than a Fall, a remediable offense, like the sins of backsliding Israel. He superimposes the exodus, desert wandering, and eventual entry into the promised land onto the story of the Fall. Our first parents' "wandering steps and slow" become positive signs, and the expulsion from Paradise accompanied by an angel becomes a rescue operation, like the one that saved Lot and his family from flaming Sodom (196-200). Although Fisch is scrupulous about observing scholarly decorum, he could be more gracious toward some of the scholars and critics whose insights he adapts.
On the whole, however, there is far more to praise than to criticize in this book. It would be a shame if rabid Shakespeare fans were to leave the game before the last out--missing the innings on Milton and Blake--because Fisch's arguments build beautifully, and he saves the best for last. He loves Milton, whom he sees (contra the Romantics) as dialogic, and his comments on Milton's covenantal hermeneutics apply to his own best criticism, which brings together "a personal context with an ancient source whereby the two enter into a relation of reciprocity without forfeiting their independence" (160). No one writing on the Bible as literature can beat Fisch at his best. He provides the most intense pleasure for the reader by mingling the voices of Homer (the descent of Hermes) and Genesis (the visit of the three angels to Abraham) with Milton's (Raphael's descent to Paradise). Or, with equal brilliance, Wisdom in Proverbs 8:30-31 ("Then I was by him as a nurseling, and I was daily his delight, playing always before him . . . "), the muse Urania in Book 7 of Paradise Lost,and Milton's Samson("I was his nursling once and choice delight, / His destined from the womb" [ll. 633-34]). Fisch's language is richly allusive even on a small scale, as when he speaks of Hamlet as "providentially unable to sleep" (109), thus implicitly comparing Hamlet to Ahasuerus (Esther 6:1). Or he dazzlingly explicates a passage from Milton's prose, which identifies the king with Samson, "'his illustrious and sunny locks, the laws, waving and curling about his godlike shoulders'" (167). Fisch notes the "surprising tribute to Charles I (whose long, rich brown tresses are clearly visible in the Van Dyck portraits)" and then tentatively suggests that Milton may also be thinking of Absalom, "betrayed, rather than protected, by his beautiful locks of hair" (168). Balancing these detailed readings [End Page 421] are broad insights and judgments that result from a lifetime of scholarship, regarding, among other things, the different conceptions of time by Greek philosophers and Greek historians, and by Aristotle and St. Augustine; the latest discoveries in biblical scholarship; and the implications for poetry of Enlightenment thought.
Perhaps the very best section of the book is the last, in which Fisch slips free of the fetters of his book's topic to engage passionately with the erotics of Blake and Shelley. Although Fisch disapproves of the freedom from authority that turns Blake's God first into Christ and then into the merely human imagination, that freedom liberates critic as well as poet. The readings of "Mock on Mock on Voltaire Rousseau," "The Tyger," the epic poem Milton,and best of all the illustrations for the Book of Job are the most powerful in the book. One of Fisch's central ideas about Blake is that he hated the law of the Hebrew Bible both in itself and as it affected Milton, but he was in thrall to the poetry of the Hebrew Bible and to Milton's biblical poetry, both of which he identified with the sublime. This split between doctrine and poetry applies to Fisch's final sections on Blake. He points out the harm of Blake's thought, which ecstatically fuses self-knowledge, eros, and death; but he responds passionately to the beauty of his poetry. To conclude, it is a sign of the book's value that one can unself-consciously compare its author with these three great poets. This book, like the poems it illuminates, should be not only read but reread.
Jason P. Rosenblatt
Jason P. Rosenblatt, Professor of English at Georgetown University, is the author of Torah and Law in "Paradise Lost" and coeditor of "Not in Heaven": Coherence and Complexity in Biblical Narrative; he is currently writing a book on Christian Hebraism in the English literary renaissance
The Biblical Presence in Shakespeare, Milton, and Blake: A Comparative Study. By Harold Fisch. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999. Pp. xiv + 331. $80.00 cloth.
This immensely learned, wide-ranging book by last year's recipient of the Israel Prize blurs distinctions between artistic creation (poetics) and interpretation (hermeneutics) by involving both in a dialogue with an authority that paradoxically constrains and frees. This encounter, which Harold Fisch calls "covenantal hermeneutics" (159), is easiest to find in Milton, where the bard of Paradise Lost,following the voice of the muse Urania, soars "above the flight of Pegasean wing" (7.1-4); where the epic's Adam, like Abraham, Moses, and Job in the Bible, both submits to and expostulates with his author, God; and where Nazarite Samson acquires power by limiting himself: "Abstemious I grew up and thriv'd amain; / He led me on to mightiest deeds / Above the nerve of mortal arm" (Samson Agonistes,ll.637-39). In the great epic and tragedy, a productive tension is generated by the authority of the prior texts of Genesis 1-3 and Judges 13-16, respectively, and the openness of Milton's midrashic interpretations of those biblical passages. Fisch's best readings approximate the encounter between the commanding voices of what he calls "thethree poets" (vii) and an interpretive freedom that often chooses to measure them against the standard of his own reading of Scripture.
Fisch finds this dialogic relationship even in Shakespeare, where he sets Hamlet's revelational encounter with the ghost of his father (1.5) over against the Sinai theophany and the Israelites' entry into covenant with God (Exodus 19ff). Hamlet alludes to the two tables of the decalogue ("my table" [1.5.98]) and the commandment to honor one's parents when he declares, "thy commandment all alone shall live / Within the book and volume of my brain, / Unmixed with baser matter" (1.5.102-4). For Fisch the two principal ways of interpreting this scene remain perpetually unresolved. The first is to read it as an example of lex talionis,deriving from the genres of Greek and Roman literature and thus resembling other moments in Renaissance revenge tragedies. Another way is to see Hamlet willingly entering into a covenant with his father's authoritative spirit, embarking on "a voyage of self-discovery" (116); like Bunyan's Pilgrim, "he is the man with a burden on his back, a seeker after salvation" (116). [End Page 419]
Fisch makes things conspicuously difficult for himself by devoting the first 150 pages of his study of biblical influence to Shakespeare, who plunders his sources so thoroughly that there is no trace of them in his voice, and by beginning with two decidedly nonbiblical plays, Julius Caesarand Antony and Cleopatra. He concentrates on what he terms the met-agon,a struggle for control of the play between biblical and nonbiblical approaches to life and art. Practicing a sort of virtual hermeneutics, he claims that Shakespeare's first audience would have interpreted the actions of the pagan Roman world of Julius Caesarby the light of the Bible. Just as Pompey, dead before the play begins, is yet a presence opposing Caesar, who falls dead at his statue's feet, so is the absent Bible, implicitly opposed to the tragic ideal, present in the play.
Fisch expresses strong opinions. He points to the dangers of tragedy, pastoral, myth, pure aesthetics, closure, monologic discourse (including the narcissism implicit in lyric), the romantic imagination, and much more. Thinking of Frazer and Nietzsche rather than Freud, he finds two primal scenes in Shakespeare's Roman plays that take the audience back to the ritual beginnings of tragedy: the conspirators bathing themselves in Caesar's blood up to the elbows after having spoken of carving him up as a sacrifice to the gods (2.1.172-74; 3.1.105-7), a reenactment of the festival of Dionysus; and Cleopatra's death scene (5.2) as a ritual apotheosis, a dying and anticipated rebirth that parallels the story of Isis and Osiris. If Cleopatra is Venus, Antony is Bacchus/Dionysus. Against Agamemnon and Orestes, who believe in salvation by human sacrifice, Fisch sets verses from the Hebrew Bible such as Deuteronomy 21:7-8, which describe the ritual performed by the elders of the nearest town when an unknown corpse is found, in order to dispel the defilement and danger brought by death. Against myth that makes Antony either a god or a beast, Fisch cites a favorite text from Ezekiel that emphasizes the human, the desire that some divine hand will "take the stony heart out of their bodies, and will give them a heart of flesh" (11:19). The biblical asserts itself unexpectedly, even bizarrely, as when the Clown enters with his basket of figs and his malapropisms in Antony and Cleopatra "his biting is immortal; those that die of it do seldom or never recover" (5.2.246-48). This becomes an allusion to Isaiah's very last verse: "for their worm shall not die, neither shall their fire be quenched" (66:24). The night-terrors experienced by Casca and Brutus are compared with those in the account of Eliphaz the Temanite in the Book of Job (4:19): "But," Fisch concludes, "dust though they are, they are also liberated--if only for a moment--from the enclosed, monologic world of myth from which tragedy derives its form and compulsions and are granted 'a difficult freedom'" (34).
One can't help wondering whether or not Fisch, whose knowledge of the Hebrew and Greek Bibles is truly profound, would admit the New Testament into the canon. At times, such as in his discussion of the great reconciliation scene in King Lear(4.7), with its powerful freight of Christian theology, he can't avoid it. Still, even in that play, he opposes a Hebraic Gloucester subplot, modeled on the story of Isaac's blessing of his two sons, to the determined tragic fate of Lear and his daughters. Hebraic pilgrimage opposes Hellenic doom. Fisch's ambivalence toward the New Testament is apparent. He reads the Hebrew Bible metonymically as human life itself, and he finds the human in figures such as the Clown in Antony and Cleopatra,the Fool in Lear,Edgar when disguised as a Bedlam beggar (a figure more truly Jobean than Lear himself), the Porter in Macbeth,and the gravediggers in Hamlet The mythologies of Greece and Rome, however, "are built on the [End Page 420] negation of death, on the . . . dream of an immortal afterlife. . . . To face death without these seductions is, we may say, the beginning of wisdom of another, more human kind" (58). Does the New Testament's promise of an afterlife ally it with these pagan mythologies? Is the crucifixion a ritual of human sacrifice? (Christ willingly chooses to die; the animal sacrificed in the deuteronomic ritual privileged by Fisch doesn't.) Since Fisch's method of covenantal hermeneutics derives ultimately from the method of midrash aggadah in the Talmud which he cites very effectively, what of the dream of an afterlife there?
If, as Fisch suggests, Shakespeare's force is centrifugal, projected outward in order to construct an autonomous universe, and Blake's is mythic, annulling differences between world and self, then his own force is Miltonic and centripetal, pulling the world toward the subjective center. Such strong readings as his, with the scope that a large book affords, will inevitably provoke resistance. One wishes occasionally that his relationship with his own past work were more open and dialogic. In a section, written in the sixties, that relies heavily on Louis Martz's seminal work The Poetry of Meditation(1954), Fisch seems to be arguing that the plot of Hamletis merely a peg on which to hang the soliloquies (106ff). He also repeats the argument that the "mortal sin original" in Paradise Lostis a lapse rather than a Fall, a remediable offense, like the sins of backsliding Israel. He superimposes the exodus, desert wandering, and eventual entry into the promised land onto the story of the Fall. Our first parents' "wandering steps and slow" become positive signs, and the expulsion from Paradise accompanied by an angel becomes a rescue operation, like the one that saved Lot and his family from flaming Sodom (196-200). Although Fisch is scrupulous about observing scholarly decorum, he could be more gracious toward some of the scholars and critics whose insights he adapts.
On the whole, however, there is far more to praise than to criticize in this book. It would be a shame if rabid Shakespeare fans were to leave the game before the last out--missing the innings on Milton and Blake--because Fisch's arguments build beautifully, and he saves the best for last. He loves Milton, whom he sees (contra the Romantics) as dialogic, and his comments on Milton's covenantal hermeneutics apply to his own best criticism, which brings together "a personal context with an ancient source whereby the two enter into a relation of reciprocity without forfeiting their independence" (160). No one writing on the Bible as literature can beat Fisch at his best. He provides the most intense pleasure for the reader by mingling the voices of Homer (the descent of Hermes) and Genesis (the visit of the three angels to Abraham) with Milton's (Raphael's descent to Paradise). Or, with equal brilliance, Wisdom in Proverbs 8:30-31 ("Then I was by him as a nurseling, and I was daily his delight, playing always before him . . . "), the muse Urania in Book 7 of Paradise Lost,and Milton's Samson("I was his nursling once and choice delight, / His destined from the womb" [ll. 633-34]). Fisch's language is richly allusive even on a small scale, as when he speaks of Hamlet as "providentially unable to sleep" (109), thus implicitly comparing Hamlet to Ahasuerus (Esther 6:1). Or he dazzlingly explicates a passage from Milton's prose, which identifies the king with Samson, "'his illustrious and sunny locks, the laws, waving and curling about his godlike shoulders'" (167). Fisch notes the "surprising tribute to Charles I (whose long, rich brown tresses are clearly visible in the Van Dyck portraits)" and then tentatively suggests that Milton may also be thinking of Absalom, "betrayed, rather than protected, by his beautiful locks of hair" (168). Balancing these detailed readings [End Page 421] are broad insights and judgments that result from a lifetime of scholarship, regarding, among other things, the different conceptions of time by Greek philosophers and Greek historians, and by Aristotle and St. Augustine; the latest discoveries in biblical scholarship; and the implications for poetry of Enlightenment thought.
Perhaps the very best section of the book is the last, in which Fisch slips free of the fetters of his book's topic to engage passionately with the erotics of Blake and Shelley. Although Fisch disapproves of the freedom from authority that turns Blake's God first into Christ and then into the merely human imagination, that freedom liberates critic as well as poet. The readings of "Mock on Mock on Voltaire Rousseau," "The Tyger," the epic poem Milton,and best of all the illustrations for the Book of Job are the most powerful in the book. One of Fisch's central ideas about Blake is that he hated the law of the Hebrew Bible both in itself and as it affected Milton, but he was in thrall to the poetry of the Hebrew Bible and to Milton's biblical poetry, both of which he identified with the sublime. This split between doctrine and poetry applies to Fisch's final sections on Blake. He points out the harm of Blake's thought, which ecstatically fuses self-knowledge, eros, and death; but he responds passionately to the beauty of his poetry. To conclude, it is a sign of the book's value that one can unself-consciously compare its author with these three great poets. This book, like the poems it illuminates, should be not only read but reread.
Jason P. Rosenblatt
Jason P. Rosenblatt, Professor of English at Georgetown University, is the author of Torah and Law in "Paradise Lost" and coeditor of "Not in Heaven": Coherence and Complexity in Biblical Narrative; he is currently writing a book on Christian Hebraism in the English literary renaissance
posted by Lori at 1:05 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home