Othello in the Wilderness: How did Shakespeare Use his Bible?

Abstract

Whatever else it may have been, the religious movement of early modern Europe now generally known as ‘the Reformation’ was certainly a crisis of reading. From Luther’s early wrestling with the significance of St Paul’s phrase ‘the righteousness of God’ (Romans 1:17) to Milton’s late and monumental effort to rewrite Augustine in De Doctrina Christiana, there is no aspect of Reformation political and religious culture that does not involve an appeal to how the Christian scriptures are to be read. What were the characteristics of the divine text? Did the category extend outside the canon of the Bible (or even everywhere within it, given Luther’s reservations about James)? Who ought to read these writings? How might a reader best access their peculiar authority? Between Luther and Erasmus on free will in the 1520s, between Whitaker and Bellarmine on the authority of tradition in the 1590s, and almost everywhere in the 1640s, controversialists throughout the period sought to tap the sacral character and transformative force of biblical language. And the issues were joined at the popular as well as the professional level. In 1599, for instance, perhaps aware that the matter had proved deeper than anticipated, the printers of the Geneva Bible included for the first time two items to assist the reader: a prefatory diagram of ‘How to take profite in reading of the holy Scriptures,’ and a poem, itself a web of redacted readings, that offers advice on how to read ‘with a single eye.’¹