On April 5th, I will be participating in the seminar, “Reading Shakespeare and the Bible,” at the 2012 annual conference of the Shakespeare Association of America in Boston. Organized and led by Thomas Fulton, Professor of English at Rutgers University, the seminar will consider the relationship between Shakespeare’s aesthetic production and the Christian Bibles and New Testaments that played such a major role in Early Modern literature and culture. Each of the participants has been asked to contribute a short paper addressing this relationship, a paper that will then be distributed to the group in preparation for the discussion during the seminar meeting itself.

Although my own work on the production and circulation of Bibles in Early Modern England has not dealt specifically with Shakespeare, I have been asked to participate in the panel because it does attempt to better define the broad cultural context necessary for asking more specific questions about the role of Scripture in the works of any author. I have not yet completed my paper, which will ultimately develop into an anthology chapter that I am slated to write later this year, but thought I would go ahead and post my abstract here:

Buying and Reading the Bible in Shakespeare’s England: A Polemic

Roughly five years before Shakespeare died in 1616, Robert Barker published the first edition of the King James Bible. It quickly became a runaway bestseller, purchased in its various editions and formats by the entire socioeconomic range of English readers. For most modern historians and literary critics, James’s decision to sponsor the translation project initially proposed by John Rainolds was designed, quite against the intentions of Rainolds and his Puritan coreligionists, to produce a Bible that would in fact be free of their fringe theology and politics, free of the beliefs that had hitherto been disseminated in the margins of the Geneva Bible. In this view, the King James Bible, with its comparatively sparse margins, was intended as an antidote to the densely annotated Geneva. This dominant narrative suggests that the Geneva Bible has from its beginning been an icon of Puritanism, a material testament to the radical Calvinism of the “hotter sort” of Protestants, at the same time that it, somehow, also became the most popular Bible version in Elizabethan and Jacobean England. This paper seeks, quite simply, to reject the idea that English Protestants tended to see religious debate in the pages of their Bibles and New Testaments, to complicate—or, as it turns out, radically simplify—the caricatured and often convoluted story about the reception of English Bibles that has motivated decades of scholarship. James I, indeed, did object to what he saw as “some notes very partiall, vntrue, seditious, and fauouring too much, of daungerous, and trayterous conceites,” but it is far from obvious that his comments should be taken as generally representative of English Protestants, as reflecting much more than the views of an obviously interested party, a monarch wary of treason. Unfortunately, however, these and the other statements made by James at the Hampton Court Conference have very much colored our understanding of how English readers interacted with and thought about their Bibles, not only in the Jacobean years, but also in the Elizabethan ones before them. By looking at the actual bibliographical record for evidence of readers’ and publishers’ preferences, I follow some recent critics in arguing that the Geneva Bible was not necessarily charged to the extent traditionally supposed, and, perhaps more controversially, I argue that early modern readers and publishers appear to have been quite inattentive to (or, perhaps, even unconcerned with) the differences between translations and the politics of their various paratexts. For them, the different translations were, just as they are for most believers today, essentially indifferent versions of the same thing: the Word of God. Whatever differences there may have been between them, English Bibles in Shakespeare’s England did more to unify their Protestant readers than they did to divide them.