Paul Adrian Fried / HAMLET'S BIBLE

What's Herod to Hamlet? My last post* surveyed occurrences of “Herod” in five Shakespeare plays. The word occurs only twice in Hamlet. (Herod had sons named after him, so Hamlet might say, What are Herods to Hamlet?)** Like King Hamlet (with an “H”) and his son Prince Hamlet [1], Herod the Great had many sons, some also named Herod. Herod means “heroic.” King Hamlet was considered heroic in battle [2]. Herod the Great had at least three of his sons executed, one for conspiring to poison him [3]. As depicted in Matthew 2:16, he was thought to be mad for seeking to have all boys less than two years old killed, after a visit from Magi who told him of signs in the heavens indicating a new king’s birth. King Hamlet kills King Fortinbras, a competitor for his lands [4]; Claudius poisoned his brother, King Hamlet, to take the throne [5]. So an allusion to Herod the Great is appropriate. But Christopher Taylor notes, “The figure of Herod loomed so large in the Christian imagination that of...

The word “Herod” [1] occurs NINE times in Shakespeare, in four plays:  Once in in 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘔𝘦𝘳𝘳𝘺 𝘞𝘪𝘷𝘦𝘴 𝘰𝘧 𝘞𝘪𝘯𝘥𝘴𝘰𝘳;  twice in 𝘏𝘢𝘮𝘭𝘦𝘵 (“out-herod’s Herod,” 3.2.14-15, and given the name of the player queen, “Baptista,” also a nod to Herod Antipas [2], who had John the Baptist beheaded for condemning his incestuous marriage);  and once in 𝘏𝘦𝘯𝘳𝘺 𝘝 as a reference to Herod the Great’s slaughter of innocents:  “Your naked infants spitted upon pikes Whiles the mad mothers with their howls confused Do break the clouds, as did the wives of Jewry At Herod’s bloody-hunting slaughtermen (3.3.38-41). “Herod” occurs five times in 𝘈𝘯𝘵𝘰𝘯𝘺 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘊𝘭𝘦𝘰𝘱𝘢𝘵𝘳𝘢 (Cleopatra lived at the same time as Herod the Great.) In the second scene, a servant says, “Let me be married to 𝘁𝗵𝗿𝗲𝗲 𝗸𝗶𝗻𝗴𝘀 in a forenoon, and widow them all: let me have a child at fifty, to whom 𝗛𝗲𝗿𝗼𝗱 of Jewry may do homage.” (1.2.27-30) We hear not only “Herod” bu...

Hamlet is the only Shakespeare play that references not merely the word "Christmas" or the secularized holiday, but the biblical/religious focus of Christmas: "that season [...] Wherein our Savior’s birth is celebrated" (1.1.173-4). Besides Jesus, the play alludes to Caesar three times [1] and twice to “tax” (verb) [2]. This involves two claims to divinity: Jesus as "Son of God," and emperors proclaimed divine after death. Hamlet also (idolatrously?) likens his father to Hamlet compares his father to Hyperion (in 1.2.144 and 3.4.66), and also to Jove (3.4.66), Mars (3.4.67), and Mercury (3.4.68), and says a man is "in apprehension... like a god” [3]. These allusions link Hamlet to a familiar Christmas gospel reading, which sets the stage for how a census allegedly [4] displaced Mary and Joseph of Nazareth, required to go to Bethlehem: “And it came to pass in those days, that there came a decree from Augustus Caesar, that all the world should be taxe...

My previous post noted that Hamlet alludes to John the Baptist [1]. Consider the religious, symbolic, and political significance of John baptizing at the Jordan [2], for Jews who knew their founding story by heart, that Moses led their ancestors through parted waters of the Red Sea to freedom and a promised land, escaping a foreign oppressor [3].  John at the Jordan plays into the same tropes, where Rome (not Egypt) is the foreign oppressor (which in part explains why Rome and Herod Antipas saw him as a threat). England’s Henry VIII claimed he needed to repent of incest, had seen action in battle, but was thought to have died a sinful man, guilty of foul crimes. Hamlet deals with an incestuous king and the ghost of a king, fearsome in battle, who died with sins on his soul, foul crimes. Same tropes. Hamlet alludes to both Julius Caesar and Jesus. Consider Jesus, preaching where Roman coins bore the image of a Roman emperor [4] with an inscription calling the emperor “son of a go...

In Shakespeare's England, the 3rd and 4th Sundays of Advent (before Christmas) featured John the Baptist [1], a prophet referred to in Hamlet. The name is feminized to "Baptista" and given to the player queen in 3.2. Hamlet claims "The Mousetrap" or "Murder of Gonzago" was an existing ("extant") historical tale [2]. In fact a Duke of Urbino (not Vienna) was poisoned; Eleanor Gonzaga was his wife. The wife of a predecessor was Battista Sforza [3]. Shakespeare made historical errors on purpose: Hamlet picks the duke’s predecessor’s wife’s name to borrow the name Baptista, so he can allude to John the Baptist, who condemned the marriage of Herod Antipas to his brother's divorced wife [4]. Hamlet wants to catch the king's conscience [5], but must avoid being too confrontational, so he borrows "Baptista" to subtly evoke (but also cleverly distract from) a biblical allusion to Jesus’ kinsman [6] who was beheaded for opposing a k...

Thomas More and Hamlet’s uncle Claudius were both, in their own ways, defenders of incestuous marriage. More would not agree to Henry VIII’s plan to break from Rome to get his divorce from his first wife, a marriage that the church had considered incestuous from the start: Henry and Catherine had to ask Rome for special permission to marry in the first place [1]. So for Hamlet to refer to Claudius as a “moor” - meaning also a “More” - would be entirely appropriate.  In Act 3, scene 4, when Hamlet refers to his father favorably as a “fair mountain” and his uncle insultingly as a "moor," to the Elizabethan ear, audiences heard no difference between "moor," or "Moor," or the last name of Thomas More [2].  Today, many may consider Thomas More a martyr for conscience who opposed Henry’s quest for divorce [3]. There is nothing wrong with this view, but it is incomplete: It doesn’t consider how some Elizabethans understood More.  By the end of her life, Elizabe...

How might a 21st century view of Sir Thomas More differ from Hamlet’s?  Catholic worship was illegal in England until 1791 [1]. More was beatified in 1886, canonized a saint in 1935.  In 1960 JFK became the first Catholic US president [2].  Robert Bolt's “A Man for All Seasons,” a play about More that won a 1962 Tony Award, had by the time of JFK’s 1963 assassination finished a successful Broadway run of 637 shows since 1961 after its London debut [3]. The hero of the play, More would not support Henry VIII's quest for a divorce from his first wife, resulting in his execution, a martyr for conscience.  Henry had sought special permission (‘dispensation’) to marry his dead brother’s widow (the church usually considered such marriages incestuous), but after 24 years of marriage and a daughter, Henry famously changed his mind after his affair with Anne Boleyn, and no thriving male heirs.  Shakespeare used More’s historical writing as a basis for Richard III, and ...

When Shakespeare has his Hamlet abbreviate his sea voyage to England (compared to the Saxo Grammaticus source c. 1185–1208) and change mode of transportation mid-sea, it seems an implied allusion to Jonah not present in Saxo. Jonah also changed mode of transport mid-sea, swallowed by a fish doing the will of a merciful God; Hamlet was figuratively swallowed by a pirate ship; they imprisoned him, but he described the pirates as "thieves of mercy" [1] Shakespeare's Hamlet never mentions Jonah explicitly, and neither does the Disney film, Pinocchio (1940) [2], but Pinocchio and Geppetto are actually swallowed by a whale, whereas the pirate ship only figuratively swallows Hamlet, so critics (who are, yes, sometimes far too literal) have been more likely to see Jonah in Pinocchio than in Hamlet's sea voyage. One might ask: Why was Shakespeare being so subtle instead of being more explicit about his Jonah echo? Was it an artistic/aesthetic choice? Or were there other fact...

How do we understand an allusion, such as Shakespeare's Hamlet using a play to catch the conscience of the king, like the prophet Nathan catching the conscience of King David? Especially after the New Critics, the "death of the author," and disillusionment with “old historicism,” there was a tendency to ignore many aspects of historical-cultural contexts in favor of only what is immediately clear in the text. This may have seemed a more objective, even empirical approach: If the text doesn't say "Nathan" or "David" or "Bathsheba," or use the same phrasing as the Bible, shall we assume there is no such biblical allusion present? The more subtle the allusion, the more reason to doubt it? What if we know that many other writers in Shakespeare's time were alluding to or retelling the David story? Did that allow for a kind of shorthand in making allusions? Last week’s post [1] noted that Shakespeare didn't always have to be explicit;...