365 Devotions pairing Scripture from the King James Bible and lines from Shakespeare's plays and sonnets. Includes little known history, curiosities, and facts about words introduced or used in new ways by Shakespeare.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1874. The publishing house Anatiposi publishes historical books as reprints. Due to their age, these books may have missing pages or inferior quality. Our aim is to preserve these books and make them available to the public so that they do not get lost.

Oxford Shakespeare Topics provides students and teachers with short books on important aspects of Shakespeare criticism and scholarship. Each book is written by an authority in its field, and combines accessible style with original discussion of its subject. Notes and a critical guide tofurther reading equip the interested reader with the means to broaden research. Despite the presence of hundreds of Biblical allusions in Shakespeare, this is the first book to explore the pattern and significance of those references in relation to a selection of his greatest plays. It reveals the Bible as a rich source for Shakespeare's uses of myth, history, comedy andtragedy, his techniques of staging, and his ways of characterizing rulers, magicians and teachers in the image of the Bible's multifaceted God. This book also discloses ways in which Shakespeare's plays offer both pious and irreverent interpretations of the Scriptures comparable to those presentedby his contemporary writers, artists, philosophers and politicians. After an opening chapter comparing the Bible as a fragmented yet unified collection of 46 books with the fragmented yet unified First Folio collection of Shakespeare's 36 plays, each of the following six chapters matches a book of the Bible with a representative play: the creation myth of Genesiswith the first play in the Folio, The Tempest, the historical epic of Exodus with Henry V, the tragedy of Job with King Lear, the tragicomedy of the Gospel of Matthew with Measure for Measure, the homiletic disputation of Paul's Epistle to the Romans with The Merchant of Venice, and the apocalypticmasque of the Book of Revelation with The Tempest again. Though its subject matter and style appeal to a broad audience, this book is grounded in recent scholarship in Shakespeare and Biblical studies. Its intertextual readings are framed by descriptions of the historical circumstances of each work's composition and reception and by an emergent theory ofallusion as a principle of creation and understanding.

A richly insightful reading of the King James Bible as a literary masterwork, published for the text's 400-year anniversary The King James Bible stands at "the sublime summit of literature in English," sharing the honor only with Shakespeare, Harold Bloom contends in the opening pages of this illuminating literary tour. Distilling the insights acquired from a significant portion of his career as a brilliant critic and teacher, he offers readers at last the book he has been writing "all my long life," a magisterial and intimately perceptive reading of the King James Bible as a literary masterpiece. Bloom calls it an "inexplicable wonder" that a rather undistinguished group of writers could bring forth such a magnificent work of literature, and he credits William Tyndale as their fountainhead. Reading the King James Bible alongside Tyndale's Bible, the Geneva Bible, and the original Hebrew and Greek texts, Bloom highlights how the translators and editors improved upon—or, in some cases, diminished—the earlier versions. He invites readers to hear the baroque inventiveness in such sublime books as the Song of Songs, Ecclesiastes, and Job, and alerts us to the echoes of the King James Bible in works from the Romantic period to the present day. Throughout, Bloom makes an impassioned and convincing case for reading the King James Bible as literature, free from dogma and with an appreciation of its enduring aesthetic value.

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1851 edition. Excerpt: ... SUPPLEMENTARY CHAPTER. THE POETICAL CHARACTERS m SCRIPTURE. Beside the authors and poets of the Old and New Testaments, there are, in the course of both, a number of characters depicted, teeming with peculiar and romantic interest, and who are abundantly entitled to the epithet poetical. It were unpardonable, in a book professing to include a summary of all the poetical elements of the Book of God, to omit a rapid survey of these, neither mute nor inglorious, although no songs have they sung, nor treatises of truth recorded, but who, "being dead, yet speak," in the eloquence, passion, devotion, or peculiarity and wickedness, of their histories. We are, therefore, tempted to annex the following chapter, as an appendix to the volume. First among these, stands Adam himself. How interesting the circumstances of his formation! Mark with what dignityGod accompanied the making of man. Behold the whole Trinity consulting together ere they proceeded to this last and greatest work of the Demiurgic days. God had only said--"Let there be light, let there be a firmament, let the waters be gathered together, let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind;" but, when man was to be taken out of the clay, the style of Deity rises, if we may so speak, above itself, and he says--" Let us make man after our own likeness." We may imagine ourselves present at this thrilling moment. A mist is watering the face of the ground, and partially bedimming the sun. Slowly, yet mysteriously, is the red clay drawn out of the ground, fashioned, and compacted into the shape of man, till the future master of the world is, as to his bodily part, complete, and lies, statue-like and still, upon the dewey ground. But speedily, like a gentle breeze, the breath of...