The Folio of This World
The playwright who wrote the folio of this world and wrote it badly (He gave us light first and the sun two days later), the lord of things as they are whom the most Roman of catholics call dio boia, hangman god, is doubtless all in all in all of us, ostler and butcher, and would be bawd and cuckold too but that in the economy of heaven, foretold by Hamlet, there are no more marriages, glorified man, an androgynous angel, being a wife unto himself. (from Ulysses, by James Joyce)
The Folio of This World (the title is a reference to the above quote from James Joyce’s Ulysses) is a very personal project for me, combining two of the great loves of my life: Shakespeare and the Hebrew bible.
Writing in the early decades of the English Reformation, Shakespeare’s language was saturated with biblical allusion. But he was also profoundly affected by the metaphysical disorientation of his era, what critic Stanley Cavell identifies as a new spirit of skepticism.
The project of this book is to link that moment of disorientation to an earlier moment. The destruction of the Jerusalem temple and the exile of the Israelite people to Babylon was at least as traumatic to the ancient Israelite understanding of the universe as the Reformation had been in Europe. And it was out of this moment that the biblical text as we know it first takes form.
The Folio of This World takes the opportunity of this kinship to place Shakespeare’s work in dialogue with the Hebrew bible, almost in the way that rabbinic midrash is in dialogue with the biblical text, and to read each through the other in way that sheds new light on both.
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