Choice 评论
Like its companion, Biblical References in Shakespeare's Tragedies (CH, Dec '87), this volume records "Shakespeare's biblical references. . .in the light of his literary sources." Although the lists are thorough and some of the annotations quite helpful, the author's assumptions remain, unfortunately, unchanged--e.g., a biblical reference is "Shakespeare's own" only if "there is no similar passage in any of Shakespeare's sources." The misguided attempt to categorize biblical references by Shakespeare as "certain, probable, or possible" soon falters when such phrases as "certain or. . .highly probable" and "probable or possible" confuse the categories. This "system" excludes "instances where only {{!}} a common idea or phrase occurs in both Shakespeare and Scripture"; however, the reader is grateful to find many such references in fine print within brackets, though not in the index. Although no consistent, coherent theory of literary influence and allusion is apparent to inform these overrefined distinctions (refined even to the point of referring to which biblical references in his sources Shakespeare accepted and which he rejected, these compendiums of Shakespeare's biblical references are of considerable value to scholars, who will take the wheat (of which there is much) and let the chaff go. For graduate libraries. -J. H. Sims, University of Southern Mississippi