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"Be ye doers of the word and not hearers only," admonishes the New Testament writer James. In Greek, the phrase "doer of the word" might be translated simply as "poet"1 or "word maker."2 Proof of William Shakespeare's facility with Greek is not necessary to concede that this translation has an ironic element that would have appealed to him. Conjecture is not necessary to establish Shakespeare's affinity with this early Christian's letter on language and truth; it is evident in the many allusions to the Epistle of James throughout the dramatist's work. Naseeb Shaheen, in his seminal Biblical References in Shakespeare's Plays, finds some part of each of James's five chapters referenced in twenty-one of Shakespeare's poems and plays. None of these allusions, according to Shaheen, is found in Macbeth. This may be an oversight. Although specific allusions may be few, James's central topics and the tropes, schemes, and urgency of his letter permeate the play. Macbeth's characters and plot, altered versions of material in Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles, produce a dramatic realization of James's overarching concerns: the dualities of appearance and reality, truth and falsehood, unity and division, and the causal consequences attending their confusion. To establish the Epistle of James as a source, and as a structuring truth source, of this play would be to illuminate readings of the play and perhaps glimpse something more of the playwright's dramaturgical purposes.
James and his Epistle would appeal to the playwright's philosophical and theological questing and poetic vision. In James, Shakespeare would find a mind given to think in contraries and similitudes; the dualism in Macbeth reflects James's axioms. Key elements of Genesis 1-3, perhaps the most common allusive feature in Shakespeare's corpus, are also foundational to James's propositions. The structure of his letter eludes consensus, but there is much to commend it to a doer of the word. Its compact aphorisms, typical of the sententiae of Shakespeare's schooling,3 are interspersed with direct appeals and brief explications that include allusions to Old and New Testaments. Reflecting the Genesis-Revelation arrangement, James begins with the topic of temptation, concludes with words on salvation, and cycles these themes throughout his letter. Macbeth also opens with temptation, but the "grace of grace"4 of its conclusion is denied to Shakespeare's tragic hero....