Renaissance Forum: Volume 4, Number 2, 2000: Thomas Rist

Harold Fisch. 1999. The Biblical Presence in Shakespeare, Milton and Blake: A Comparative Study. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 331pp. ISBN 0-19-818489. Ł45.

At first sight, The Biblical Presence in Shakespeare, Milton and Blake might seem misnamed. Although the relation of these writers to the Bible is central to Fisch's study, the Bible is not the centre of the work. Fisch rejects what he calls the 'narrow' study of influence – mere pointing to sources – and aims to discuss 'the tension set up between these [biblical sources] and other cultural influences' (Fisch 1999, vii): in other words, the Bible is presented as one of a number of competing cultural 'determinants' in the formation of texts – though Fisch never specifies precisely how 'hard' his determinism is. In general, however, the result is consistently thought-provoking and clearly written literary criticism performed against a variety of different historical settings in each of which Fisch seems impressively at home. One of the joys of the book, moreover, is that by and large – and I shall comment on the exception shortly – it maintains its sense of a historical development of ideas, thereby (mostly) avoiding the problem of reading modern issues 'back' into history that has at times plagued historicist work. Even when Blake is – one initially feels a touch trendily – read in terms of writings by Nietzsche, and thereby Derrida and Foucault, the poet is presented as anticipating the philosophers. The relatively small gap in time and – as Fisch shows – culture between Blake and Nietzsche renders Fisch's closing discussion of the origins of 'post-modern' difficulties largely persuasive. Despite its broadly historical and, in practice at least, literary-critical conservatism The Biblical Presence in Shakespeare, Milton and Blake has learnt – or adapted – many lessons of post-modernism. This is most obvious in the book's determination to read the texts it examines – and indeed the cultures in which they were written – not as entities, but in terms of competing paradigms. The fact that the paradigms are still there shows the limits of such 'deconstruction', but the post-modern 'influence' is clear. Thus, in the largest and, for me, most interesting section of the book, Shakespeare's Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra are closely read in terms of the conflicts they present between Judaeo-Christian and broadly 'Roman' cultures, while Hamlet and King Lear are in turn read in terms of tensions between tragic and pagan concepts of life as 'end-stopped' and Judaeo-Christian concepts of transcendence, as well as – relatedly – pagan stoicism and Judaeo-Christian understandings of endurance and witness. But while more traditional criticism might have attempted to find unity in such juxtapositions, for Fisch the agon – a concept he refers to frequently – of the drama lies in the unresolvibility of these contradictory cultural forces. King Lear, for example, which he (in my opinion rightly) regards as the apex of Shakespeare's achievement in this respect, is thus discussed under the heading 'Organized Incoherence' [my emphasis].
Fisch's progress from Shakespeare to Milton to Blake is, thus, a reading in ever-enlarging visions of fundamental cultural incoherence and the poetic awareness of such incoherence, concluding with Blake's anticipations of the post-modern sense of the incoherence of language itself. In this sense, the study is a reading not just of a number of individual authors, but of the very progress of western culture towards disunity. But in reading thus, the book is itself highly unified – which both adds to its own readability while suggesting paradox – and arguably contradiction – at the heart of the study. If Fisch can read the incoherent past so coherently, one wonders, then why could not his chosen authors – whom he clearly admires – do the same? The suggestion of the end of the study is that the post-modern development of the human sense of the 'utmost limit' of coherence – namely, the incoherence of language – has rendered the incoherencies of the past particularly visible (Fisch 1999, 324). But if so, should Fisch not have emphasised more the past's presumably greater senses of unity? And, if so, how has Fisch – himself a modern – managed so coherent a study? One answer to both these questions is not just that the study is over-coherent in its account of history – which may well be true – but that it is radically over-coherent. The other – which seems more likely – is that the book has underestimated the unifying features of its chosen authors and, ultimately, of western history itself. Arguably here retrospective reading is responsible.
In the end, one senses that Fisch is aware of this problem – fundamental to the first principles of the study – and yet uncertain how to resolve it. Parodying Blake, he concludes by questioning the 'fearful cost' at which we have become aware of our incoherence, thereby apparently closing the study on a paradoxical note. But paradox is a literary and aesthetic device, and Fisch provides no answer to his implicit historical question: his unified view of western history's fundamental contradictions remains, undermining the study itself.
There are, too, problems of emphasis. For example, Fisch's discussion of Antony and Cleopatra makes much of the Egyptian myth of Osiris 'the dying and rising god', and Fisch considers this a 'tragic paradigm' of the play (Fisch 1999, 63). The discussion is interesting, but would not English Renaissance audiences have primarily interpreted such a myth Christologically? And if so, why is so little said of the Christian dimension of the play? And why does Fisch 'refer of course [my emphasis] to the Judaic system' in the discussion and only thereby to Christian paradigms (Fisch 1999, 64). Indeed, the emphasising of Old over (often more obvious) New Testament influences is a curious feature of the study as a whole.
Nevertheless, The Biblical Presence in Shakespeare, Milton and Blake is an often perceptive study which – despite the limitations I have outlined – will be of interest to scholars and students alike. It will be of particular use to those students in need of a coherent, introductory 'over-view' of English literary developments. I have already ordered a copy for the university library here.

THOMAS RIST
THE UNIVERSITY OF TAMPERE