Abstract
Those marooned in isolation by BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs are asked to choose a book they would like to have with them. It is assumed, however, that both the Bible and the Complete Works of Shakespeare are already on the island. Why is this? Is it because we can’t quite imagine a world without them? Or is it because the producers know that if they weren’t already on the island a majority of guests would choose one or the other, creating less interesting programmes?
Either way, it can be agreed that in Western culture both Shakespeare and the Bible are ‘sacred texts’ in that they are considered to contain no trivialities, are full of rich and unending meanings and are treated in distinctively different ways to other books. We give them more authority, even if we disagree with them, and many feel the texts speak directly to them regardless of their historical origins. I was taught at university that a text without context is usually a pretext. When reading the Bible and Shakespeare, though, we often regard ourselves as the intended audience for the words, and this whole phenomenon has prompted Jem Bloomfield to write his first book.
Bloomfield is an enthusiastic author whose exploratory spirit is infectious. With a watchful eye for similarities, he traces the disagreements over which biblical and play texts should be included in the canon, the ways in which the final texts have been variously interpreted and how performance has been used to enhance their resonance – though Charles Lamb, of course, thought Shakespeare should never be performed on stage. There are a couple of interesting chapters too on ways in which both canons are used in non-theatrical and non-religious contexts by adverts, novels and politicians, for example. By revealing something of how tradition, cultural associations and worldviews shape our reading, Bloomfield identifies ways in which words become empowered. As Bloomfield’s colleague at Nottingham University, Peter Kirwan, notes, the power of a book often lies not in what it is but in what we need it to be.
Bloomfield is drawn to the Russian literary critic Victor Shlovsky’s belief that literature has the potential for ‘defamiliarization’, revealing the world in arrestingly fresh ways. History can do the same and so, Bloomfield states: ‘Part of the purpose of Words of Power is to help us look again at our own religious and literary reading, and to see it as bizarre, outrageous, eccentric and obscure’ (p. 14). In this he is successful in showing us how texts are as adept at reading us as we them.
The question that some might have at the end of this book is whether biblical exegesis and Shakespeare criticism do, at the end of the day, have more to offer each other than some similarities? Does the imaginative and inconclusive creative reading of Shakespeare conflict too readily with the dogmatic squeezing of biblical texts into belief-systems? Does the mysterious subject of the divine will within the biblical poetry jar with the humanistic and experiential reflections of the Shakespeare plays? On the desert island can both volumes, though sharing a quirky and fallible human readership, have more of a relationship than merely sharing a shelf? I’m grateful to Jem Bloomfield for provocatively shaping these questions in my mind to see where they might lead and I hope more books from him are on the way.