Building upon the foregoing chapter, Chapters 4 and 5 read Matthew’s passion psalm references Davidically, as was common in the Second Temple period. This chapter focuses on Matthew’s trial narratives before the Sanhedrin and Pilate, with the resulting portrait that Jesus– like the innocent-but-taciturn David of the lament psalms– is maligned by false witnesses but nevertheless remains silent.

Matthew’s passion constantly references the psalms. Though scholarship has frequently taken the speaker of these psalms to be “the Psalmist,” I show this to be a fourth-century neologism. Instead, Second Temple readers most often equate the speaker with the figure of David and his struggles. The result is that Matthew’s psalm references can be read Davidically.

Beginning with the puzzle of which “scriptures” Jesus claims direct his fate and demise, I detail the many parallels between Matthew’s arrest narrative and the Absalom revolt in the Davidic succession narrative– in both, the Davidic figure is betrayed and oppressed. After surveying Davidic messianic figures who were either the beneficiaries of divine violence or themselves militant leaders, I argued that, by contrast, Matthew draws upon a text in which David, like Jesus, suffers without retaliating, thus helping him make the case for his humiliated Davidic messiah.

The sum of the previous chapters suggests how Matthew uses scripture to present Jesus as a new David to his primarily Jewish audience. Matthew attempts to resolve the tension in his Gospel between Jesus as “the messiah, the son of David” (1:1) and Jesus as humiliated, executed criminal by situating Jesus’s suffering within the scriptural suffering of David. In so doing, Matthew attempts to make the startling case that Jesus is the Davidic messiah not despite, but because of, his trials and woes.

The psalms are everywhere in Matthew’s crucifixion narrative, but are rarely read Davidically– the first task of this chapter. Building off the results of Chapters 4 and 5, I then synthesize Matthew’s deployment of the psalms and situate them into Jesus’s biography. Such a reading strategy fits comfortably within the framework established in Chapter 3; that is, Matthew also sets the psalms within David’s life, and goes a step further by having the son of David reenact his sufferings.

Pater published three essays on Shakespeare, and probably considered a longer series, possibly to culminate in a book. His attention in the completed essays is directed towards plays that were relatively unpopular in his own day, and in the case of two of these he can be said to occupy an important position in the history of their reception. Modern critics of Richard II and Love’s Labour’s Lost still regularly, if cursorily, cite Pater as a milestone. But Pater’s contribution to Shakespearean criticism more generally is rarely remembered or appraised. This chapter attempts to estimate and characterise the influence Pater has had on subsequent criticism of Shakespeare, sometimes in unexpected places, and also to draw out some of the insights of which later criticism takes less notice. Each of Pater’s Shakespeare studies attempts to formulate relations between ethics and aesthetics, and many of their central terms – fineness, justice, grace, etc. – are used with both moral and aesthetic significance. By examining these essays in the context of other Shakespearean criticism and of Pater’s wider work, it is possible to arrive at some idea of what Shakespeare meant to him.

A distinctive feature of Pater’s oeuvre is that, like many French critics of his generation, he wrote both literary and art criticism; in this respect his work parallels that of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, poet and painter. The chapter argues that, if Jerome McGann is right to describe Pater’s essay on Rossetti as ‘the best single study of Rossetti’s poetry we have’, that is because Pater provides the most persuasive interpretation of this double aspect of Rossetti’s work. The essay is densely intertextual with other writings of Pater’s in ways that can be surprising: verbal cross-references link Rossetti not only to his own chosen precursors (Dante as well as Blake and Michelangelo) but also to Gautier and Baudelaire, and, more importantly, to Plato. Thus it plays a more significant role in Pater’s overall critical project than previous scholars have recognised, not least explaining to us a historical fact that may seem difficult to understand: the extraordinary influence of Rossetti on both painters and poets of his own and succeeding generations, an influence out of all proportion, some may think, to his actual achievement in either art form.

Pater describes the writings of Charles Lamb as ‘an excellent illustration of the value of reserve in literature’. The remark is surprising because Lamb more often is celebrated for the warm familiarity of his essays rather than the withholding and coolness associated with reserve. It is Pater himself who was famed for his reserve, shy in company and elusive in his writing. But his essay on Lamb identifies a different quality of reserve and the different ways in which it can operate as an element of literary style. The humour of Lamb’s writing is a form of reserve that conceals the tragic facts of his life. Such concealment works through excess and deflection, masking the personal without seeming too remote or buttoned-up. What Pater values in Lamb provides insight into the peculiar reserve of his own writing, with its paradoxical mix of the personal and impersonal, and its style that is at once so elusive and so individually distinctive.

The second part of this book focusses on Pater’s engagement with a number of major English writers. Appreciations covers all post-medieval centuries, excluding only the ‘Augustan’ period about which Pater was rather less than enthusiastic (though he did design, and perhaps complete, an essay on Dr Johnson). Pater is not normally thought of as a leading Shakespearean, but unsurprisingly Shakespeare was central to his idea of English literature, and at one point he may possibly have planned a whole volume on him; he was also at least sympathetic to the idea of undertaking a commentary for schoolboy use on Romeo and Juliet, whose ‘flawless execution’ he commended (‘Measure for Measure’, App., 170). Typically he did not write about the most celebrated plays (his own favourites also included Hamlet), but instead chose for treatment ones less popular in his day: Love’s Labour’s Lost (perhaps because of its reflections on language and style), Measure for Measure (arguably the finest of his three essays, centrally concerned with the way a work of art can profitably engage with ethics), and Richard II (the main focus of ‘Shakespeare’s English Kings’, where Pater contributed to the idea of Richard as the ‘poet-king’ and added to the understanding of the deposition scene). Alex Wong examines all three essays in detail, and comments on the overall value and distinctive character of Pater’s view of Shakespeare.

The closing phase of Pater’s 1868 review, ‘Poems by William Morris’, reappeared in 1873 as his Conclusion to The Renaissance. This chapter takes Pater’s engagement with Morris – both initially, and in these altered contexts – as a basis for thinking about his contribution to the development of English Studies. His evaluative criteria and methodology are also germane: what Pater values in Morris also envisions what he values in literature more generally. His account of ‘flux’ and perceptualism are familiar; but in the Morris review Pater is drawn more insistently to analogies with water – a fluidity expressing his aversion to walls, whether cultural or material, and a toleration of literature in dilution. Dilution is not commonly associated with literary virtues, not least because the twentieth-century re-founders of English tended to value concentration and concretion over any impression of looseness or dispersal. It is argued, however, that Pater recovers value from dilution – indeed, a dynamisation – though engagement with the language of cures associated with the then-fashionable alternative medicine of homeopathy.