This is a welcome book full of insights into Shakespeare's allusions to his most important and most creatively used source. The first half of the book includes a wealth of evidence for the ‘thick biblical culture’ (p. 42) in which Shakespeare lived and worked, an overview of early criticism of Shakespeare's use of the Bible and a discussion of the theory of allusion; the second half involves in-depth studies of specific plays. The chapter on allusion builds on Richmond Noble's observation that allusion ‘“involves the reader or spectator in a working partnership with the author”’ (p. 66) and suggests that Shakespeare's allusive practice keeps close to the word's etymological origins in play (ludere). Shakespeare's biblical allusions generally involve irony, subversion or parody, ‘some sense of adaptation or adjustment to a new context, which is one of the creative aspects that makes allusion interesting’ (p. 85). A study of Shakespeare's allusion to the Bible is particularly fitting for, as Hamlin argues, allusive strategies (in the form of typology, echo and cross-referencing) are crucial to the source text itself (Hamlin notes that ‘allusion’ entered English through biblical commentaries) (p. 88). The second half of the book contains illuminating discussions of Genesis i–iii, divine imagery in the Roman plays, the links between Macbeth and the Apocalypse, the ‘brilliant perversity’ (p. 252) of Falstaff's biblical allusion and King Lear and the book of Job. This final chapter is particularly strong. It provides context from Calvin's sermons on Job and from Luther's theology of deus absconditus to argue that the play's apparent rejection of any theological explanation for innocent suffering does not make it a non-Christian drama, but rather a play that fully engages with theological problems: ‘Shakespeare was a more skeptical reader of Job than was Calvin, and a skeptical reader of Calvin too, probing the anxieties about Job that the reformer was not quite able to argue away’ (p. 333). Sometimes Hamlin could spend longer teasing out the way that allusions are made to work by Shakespeare. For example in this exchange between Hal and Falstaff:

Hamlin writes that ‘Hal is surely a bit thick’ because he makes an allusion to Proverbs (‘Wisdome cryeth without: she uttereth her voyce in the streete… and none would regarde’: Proverbs i.20, 24) ‘failing to notice that the allusion has already been made by Falstaff’ (p. 238). It could, however, be argued that what is happening here is almost the opposite of this. The odd syntax of Falstaff's speech – his frequent pauses and use of short phrases which repeat the key words ‘wisely’ and ‘street’ – are an invitation to Hal to produce the biblical punch-line; an invitation that is persistently ignored. Falstaff provides Hal with an easy witticism through the completion of the familiar biblical allusion in an attempt to draw Hal into a comic double-act. Hal's refusal to complete the joke – until after Falstaff has given him numerous verbal nudges – is an early signal that he is drawing away from Falstaff, that he is no longer the sparring partner that he once was. It is a moment of pathos: an awkward break-down of comic timing which reveals an emotional separation; and the effect is enhanced for a biblically literate audience who might hear the jarring hiatus between Falstaff's set-up of the allusion and Hal's completion of it. It is an example which reveals the extent to which biblical allusions are often embedded into the specific moment in Shakespeare's plays and on the whole Hamlin's exploration of this dramatic context is likely to bring satisfying moments of recognition and insight for the general reader and the specialist alike. For example, Hamlin notes that even when Falstaff rejects memento mori – ‘Peace, good Doll, do not speak to me like a death's-head, do not bid me remember mine end’ (Henry IV part II, 2·4·231–2) – he cannot relinquish his habitual allusions to biblical phrases (here Psalm xxxix's ‘Lord, let me know mine end’) (p. 249). In The Winter's Tale the pre-lapsarian feel of Leontes's childhood reminiscences is given strength by the verbal connection between his ‘unbreeched’ youth (1·2·154) and the famous Geneva translation of Genesis iii.7 in which Adam and Eve make themselves ‘breeches’ to cover their nakedness (a translation that led to this being known as the ‘Breeches Bible’) (p. 173). Likewise Hamlin creatively links the importance of the verb ‘come’ in both Revelation and the final scenes of Antony and Cleopatra, arguing that the connection adds ‘resonance to the aesthetic mystery that is achieved on stage’ (p. 230). This could be taken as a description of how Shakespeare's biblical allusions work as a whole; Hamlin's book is an illuminating and insightful guide to their astonishing richness.