Series: Straus Center for Torah and Western Thought

History:

10 - 15th Centuries CE 

Collections: Twice Blest: Exploring Shakespeare and the Hebrew Bible

Description

What are blessings? Prayers? Protections? A performative act? In this episode, Professor Julia Reinhard Lupton, Shakespeare scholar and co-director of the UCI Shakespeare Center, rethinks the love gambit that opens King Lear as a battle of biblical prooftexts and tracks the presence and purpose of benediction in the play and beyond to reveal a cascade of blessings throughout Shakespeare’s works.