Shakespeare’s Bible

A Concordance of Biblical References in the Works of William Shakespeare

Geneva Bible
Naseeb Shaheen
Biblical references
Folger Shakespeare Library
Hand D
Sir Thomas More
Combining Naseeb Shaheen’s catalogue of 3,500 biblical allusions with David Kathman’s transcription of marks in the Folger Geneva Bible — every reference, every match, searchable and sortable.

Shakespeare’s Bible, given his success at steering clear of all forms of religious trouble, was probably the authorised version, The Bishop’s Bible. Substantially revised in 1572, the 1602 edition was prescribed as the base text for the King James Version that was completed in 1611.

Shakespeare’s Bible, given his success at steering clear of all forms of religious trouble, was probably the authorised version, The Bishop’s Bible. Substantially revised in 1572, the 1602 edition was prescribed as the base text for the King James Version that was completed in 1611.

The Bible Shakespeare Knew

The 3,500 references Naseeb Shaheen catalogued across the Shakespearean canon are not the product of a pious education. They are the contextual fabric of a mind that had absorbed its favoured parts of the Bible so thoroughly that its cadences surface everywhere—in the history plays when kingship reaches its moral limits, in the comedies when justice tips toward mercy, in the tragedies when characters grope and pivot toward whatever hand fate requires them to play.

Old Testament references cluster where divine agency is at stake. Samuel, Kings, the Psalms of David—the anointed ruler answerable to a moral order he had no hand in designing—they run through the Henriad and the Richards like a bass part in a concerto. When Richard II surrenders his crown he is not merely losing a throne; he is embodying the theology of sacred kingship that Shakespeare’s audience would have heard in the language of the pulpit. The Psalms alone account for nearly four hundred references. Immersion is responsible. The Bible is Shakespeare’s hinterland. He farms it with compassion and gives the dogma to his baddies.

The New Testament material is distributed differently. Of the 36 plays in The First Folio, 33 are referenced in Genesis alone. Yet in the book in which the odds of an Oxfordian match should be highest, there are none. A single annotation in Oxford’s Geneva Bible represents the entire interest of the De Vere family’s Geneva. The playwright is drawn to where power meets its obligations—in the courtroom, on the battlefield, in the sickbed—and it draws most heavily on Matthew, Luke, and Romans. The Sermon on the Mount accounts for eighty-six references across thirty plays.

When Portia tells Shylock that the quality of mercy is not strained, she is repurposing Matthew 5:7 for a secular audience, not lip-serving pious education—nor absorbing the evangelical intent directly. When the kings of the history plays invoke forgiveness or condemn hypocrisy they reach, repeatedly and without apparent design, for the language of Matthew 6. The matches with the Folger Geneva are concentrated here—not because an annotator’s underlinings explain Shakespeare’s references, but because both the annotator and the playwright were drawn to the same passages for the same reason: these were the verses that bore most directly on how power ought to behave.

A match is a match however, and even where they congregate most closely, Shakespeare and the Geneva’s annotators never meet convincingly in the same place. We can’t agree with Stritmatter’s certainty that Edward De Vere made all (or even any) of the marks. He was involved in a succession crisis, but a successive De Vere, Aubrey the 20th and last Earl, was involved in a Civil War in which the Divine Right of Kings was the primary stake. Aubrey lost everything then regained it at the Restoration. Just as likely to have owned the Bible as Edward but with a far better claim to the marks surrounding succession in David’s Israel.

The most arresting case lies outside Shaheen’s catalogue entirely—in the manuscript pages of Sir Thomas More. More’s address to a London mob baying for the expulsion of foreign immigrants draws on the parable of the Good Samaritan with a directness that is almost shocking: the stranger on the road is the refugee at the gate, and the question Christ puts to the lawyer–which of these three was neighbour?–becomes a question put to the fearful, angry crowd about what England might owe to the people it fears. This is Luke 10 deployed as political argument, written in a hand identified as Shakespeare’s, in a play he did not originate and had no obligation to improve in this direction. It is great work he will reuse in Coriolanus—a clear, high definition item of evidence showing that the biblical saturation of the canon was not decorative, not incidental, and highly unlikely to be the property of an aristocratic education. It lies firmly in the wheelhouse of a working playwright who knew exactly how to deploy it for his audience without treading on the toes of the censor or the cleric.

Bible books in canonical order. Dark red bars show Folger marks — where the annotator marked his Geneva Bible. Green bars show Shaheen references — where Shakespeare’s plays draw on the Bible. The two patterns do not coincide.

Bible books in canonical order. Dark red bars show Folger marks — where the annotator marked his Geneva Bible. Green bars show Shaheen references — where Shakespeare’s plays draw on the Bible. The two patterns do not coincide.

And yet…

We can see the same irregular patterns of interest in his Bible reading that Shakespeare displays in the use of his other sources. He knows what he likes and he knows what will land in that short distance from the boards to the pit. Detailed imperial grandiloquence for the Roman satrap Enobarbus, who speaks mostly in deathless verse as he introduces Cleopatra. Charmian, who bids her adieu, equally unforgettably, is clearly a young maid from Aston Cantlow. He’s not really writing history and he’s certainly not preaching to the groundlings. He’s not didactic at all. His bible interests are concentrated in the same way as his source material. He focusses tightly on the material that most serves his dramatic purposes. And if it doesn’t, if Hotspur’s age is wrong for the comparison with Hal, or the Sermon on the Mount gets a bit windy, he’ll change it and not think twice.

Marlowe

Oxford was different. Never particularly religious and certainly not influenced by the same parts of the Bible. Opposites in many ways, at opposite ends of many Elizabethan spectra, class, talent, money, influence, politics. Another way to appreciate the distance is to look at the same comparator, Bible references, but add to the mix someone much closer to Shakespeare, another grammar school boy, another son of the middle class, another up and comer, another playwright. Christopher Marlowe.

Marlowe’s Top 15 Shakespeare’s Top 15 Annotator’s Top 15
Matthew 114 Psalms 419 1 Samuel 80
Psalms 104 Matthew 416 Ecclesiasticus 55
Revelation 97 Luke 297 2 Samuel 48
John 64 Genesis 184 1 Kings 35
Luke 60 Job 145 Isaiah 34
Isaiah 58 Revelation 131 Wisdom 22
Job 55 Mark 121 Ezekiel 21
Romans 52 Romans 112 2 Esdras 20
Genesis 42 Isaiah 107 Revelation 18
Hebrews 42 Exodus 98 Hosea 18
Acts 30 Proverbs 96 Psalms 17
Mark 30 Deuteronomy 95 Deuteronomy 12
2 Corinthians 24 1 Corinthians 85 2 Chronicles 12
2 Peter 22 Acts 76 2 Maccabees 12
2 Maccabees 14 1 Samuel 72 Jeremiah 11
Total 808 Total 2,454 Total 415

And there it is, immediately visible. Not close enough for attribution purposes but the sort of relationship Stritmatter must have been praying for. Both playwrights have Psalms and Matthew as their top two books of interest, both books the preference of writers, the psalms short and pithy, Matthew clear and almost modern. Both are far more likely to reference Genesis—the New Testament generally in fact, while the annotators mostly ignore the gospels. Overall, Shakespeare and Marlowe have 10 matches in their Top 15 books. No such commonality in the relationship with the annotators. Stritmatter’s case is once again reduced to small numbers of suggestive overlaps, deliberately distracting attention from the much bigger resemblances in books referenced more frequently by both playwrights.

What about the dogs that don’t bark in the night time? Neither Shakespeare nor the annotators appear to have read John yet it’s one of Marlowe’s favourite books—hardly evidence of diligent study on Shakespeare’s side. Without coming anywhere close to proving that Shakespeare and Marlowe are the same person, (and we are sure that Marlovians will agree), there is a likeness of interests shown in this table that is everywhere absent when comparing Shakespeare to the annotators. Yet not only has Stritmatter not looked at this relationship in a 130,000-word work on connecting up Bible references to Bankside, not only has he not examined Shakespeare’s comparative interests at the book level, he confected an alternative scenario to divert attention from the similarities between Bankside’s two greatest Elizabethan playwrights.

You can do your own research on this page. The table below provides a front end to the whole dataframe we used for our first analysis of Oxford’s Bible, all 3500 rows. The playlinks take you to the text in the MIT online Shakespeare. There isn’t an online copy of the Geneva that allows manipulation from other sites but the references in the table can be used with this Gateway, which lacks the Apocrypha.

The Concordance

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Note

Citation: Leadbetter, M. (2025). Shakespeare’s Bible: A Concordance of Biblical References in the Works of William Shakespeare. Prima Facie Shakespeare. CC-BY 4.0. Data sources: Shaheen, N. (1999). Biblical References in Shakespeare’s Plays. University of Delaware Press; Kathman, D. Transcription of marks in Folger STC 2106.