Words of Power: Reading Shakespeare and the Bible

by Jem Bloomfield

Overview

Shakespeare and the Bible are titans of English-speaking culture: their images are endlessly cited and recycled, and their language permeates everything from our public ceremonies to our private jokes. In Words of Power, Jem Bloomfield explores the cultural reverberations of these two collections of books, and how each era finds new meanings as they encounter works such as Hamlet or the Gospel of Mark.Beginning with a shrewd examination of how we have codified and standardised their canons, deciding which books and which words are included in the official collections and which are excluded, Bloomfield charts the ways in which every generation grapples with these enigmatic and complex texts. He explores the way they are read and performedin public, the institutions that use their names to legitimise their own activities, and how the texts are quoted by politicians, lords and rappers. Words of Power throws modern ideas about Shakespeare and the Bible into sharp relief by contrasting them with those of our ancestors, showing how our engagements with these texts reveal as much about ourselves as their actual meanings.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780718894139
Publisher:	The Lutterworth Press
Publication date:	05/26/2016
Pages:	176
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.17(h) x (d)

About the Author

Jem Bloomfield is an Assistant Professor of Literature at the University of Nottingham. A scholar of Renaissance literature, he studied at Oxford before earning his PhD from the University of Exeter. In his free time, he blogs about Shakespeare, Christianity, and feminism – and occasionally detective fiction – at quiteirregular.wordpress.com.

Table of Contents

"1. Introduction
2. The text itself: the canon and textual criticism
3. People of the books: institutional authority and control
4. Ways of reading: modes of interpretation through history
5. Performing the word: the texts’ use in public and private
6. Calling on their name: quotation, advertisement and appropriation
7. Conclusion"

Editorial Reviews

Bloomfield is an enthusiastic author whose exploratory spirit is infectious. With a watchful eye for similarities, he traces the disagreements over which biblical and play texts should be included in the canon, the ways in which the final texts have been variously interpreted and how performance has been used to enhance their resonance… I’m grateful to Jem Bloomfield … and I hope more books from him are on the way.

Mark Oakley

From a professor of English comes a book about reading that offers insight and challenge to those of us, like myself, who call ourselves 'people of the book'. This is a respectful book - but one that respects different views enough to criticise and challenge them. I would recommend this book to those studying theology - at any level and for any purpose - as well as those studying Shakespeare or historical English literature and wanting to get a handle on just how texts can shape people.

AdmiralCreedy Blog - Thomas Creedy Christian

Bloomfield's strength his his ability to touch upon highly complex topics and make them accesible while still acknowledging their complexity. I very much hope that there's room for an expanded edition or follow-up work, taking the questions he raises forward.

Legionseagle Blog

Packed with material that has made me think in new ways, not only about the Bible and Shakespeare, but also more widely about the nature of a "canon", what makes a text "sacred", different ways of reading familiar texts, the nature of performance and proclamation, how texts form communities and identities, and the complex ways in which texts are appropriated and quoted.

John Halton