Not, let us repeat, that the Bible can be theatrized. Neither church nor
playhouse can revive the forms of Judaism, without recalling its lost
spirit. And that must be a bold hand, indeed, that shall undertake to
mend again the shivered vail of the Temple, or collect from its ruins a
ritual which He that was greater than Solomon typically denounced in
foretelling the overthrow of that gorgeous pile. The Bible, as to its
important verities and solemn doctrine, is transparent to the
imagination and affections, and does not require the mediation of dumb
show or scenic travesty.

It is not difficult to trace many familiar dramatic resemblances in the
Old Testament. Shakspeare, who was certainly well read in the Bible and
frequently quotes it, in the composition of Lear may have had David and
Absalom in mind; the feigned madness of Hamlet has its prototype in that
of David; Macbeth and the Weird Sisters have many traits in common with
Saul and the Witch of Endor. Jezebel is certainly a suggestive study for
Lady Macbeth. The whole story has its key in that verse where we read,
"There was none like unto Ahab, which did sell himself to work
wickedness in the sight of the Lord, _whom Jezebel, his wife, stirred
up_." As in the play, so in this Scripture, we have the unrestrained and
ferocious ambition of the wife conspiring with the equally cruel, but
less hardy ambition of the husband. When Macbeth had murdered sleep,
when he could not screw his courage to the sticking-point, when his
purpose looked green and pale, his wife stings him with taunts, scathes
him with sarcasm, and by her own energy of intellect and storm of will
arouses him to action. So Ahab came in heavy and displeased, and laid
him down on his bed, and turned away his face, and so his wife inflames
him with the sharpness of her rebuke. "Why art thou sad?" she asks.
"Dost thou now govern the kingdom of Israel? Arise, eat bread, and be
merry!" The lust of regal and conjugal pride, intermixed, works in both.