Past scholarship has ignored Davidic material after Matthew’s last mention of “David,” with the result that Davidic sonship is either overlooked or, even more drastically, subordinated to other messianic “titles” in Matthew’s passion narrative. Appealing to both intertextuality and messianic grammar, I call for a methodological corrective that attends to David material in Matthew’s passion with the goal of understanding Matthew’s startling claim that Jesus is the Davidic messiah despite his shameful death.

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.