Prologue to Chapters 3 and 4: Shakespeare’s Pauline Women

Adjunct Research Professor An unintended contradiction in St Paul’s New Testament letters inspired Shakespeare’s dramatic experiments with four of his most boldly outspoken women characters: Adriana, Marina, Hermione, and Paulina.1 The paradox originated in Paul’s inconsistent views about women. On the one hand, texts such as First Corinthians 14 commanded female silence in public and subordination to men. On the other hand, messianic declarations in Galatians 3 and other Pauline letters abolished gender and ethnic differences. Paul also explicitly named and praised women co-workers. As a playwright, Shakespeare recognized that dramatizing fictional versions of these contrary views could generate intense conflict in situations where eloquent women push back against mistreatment by men. Women could respond to misogynist St Paul with emancipatory Paul. The authority of St Paul’s restrictions on women’s speech, dress, and marital behaviour had customarily given abusive or adulterous men a free pass. In European Christian culture, this default position emerged from the first century onwards as theologians such as Augustine and Tertullian rationalized Paul’s shifting statements about women in various eastern Mediterranean cities and turned them into dogmatic theology. Early modern English conduct books for women such as John Dodd and Robert Cleaver’s A Godly Form of Household Government (1598) updated this patriarchal order, often citing St Paul. Adriana, Marina, Hermione, and Paulina each subvert this legacy. Their individually varied but commonly principled opposition grows out of Shakespeare’s rhetorical study of Paul’s texts in school, in the Geneva Bible commonly read at home, and in Bishops’ Bible passages heard in church services. This continual scriptural exposure and reception were also mediated by paratexts, such as Geneva’s commentary notes and Erasmus’s biblical Paraphrases, as well as oral and printed sermons, polemical literature, and visual representations. The Geneva notes, intended for lay readers, often tried to reconcile Paul’s inconsistencies according to Calvinist doctrines or to defuse their potential for debate or dissent through allegorical interpretations seeking to elevate Paul’s historical statements into eternal truths. But when independent-minded readers and writers like Marlowe or Shakespeare put St Paul’s words in intellectual conversation with wider networks of sacred or secular textuality, Paul’s opinions invited temporal and linguistic scrutiny. The Geneva Bible itself, after all, was a Protestant vernacular challenge to the magisterium of the Catholic Latin Vulgate as well as a contemporary nationalist project energized by unauthorized public circulation in print (at first) and official political opposition. Moreover, when the Geneva editors offered historical glosses on particular texts, they unavoidably revealed that Paul did not always speak in a timeless ‘apostolic’ voice and that specific first-century controversies and Hellenistic religious practices which confronted him altered his changing verbal registers and personal views. Erasmus’s critically illuminating Paraphrases (Latin 1517, English translation 1547) likewise made the historical contingency of Paul’s statements and actions visible to ordinary readers, while their re-presentation of the bible in continuous prose narratives invited literary and fictional adaptation. (See ‘Literary Criticism and Problems of Reading and Interpretation’, ‘Eloquence and Rhetoricity’. Appendix.)

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.