Paul Adrian Fried / HAMLET'S BIBLE

At least four biblical echoes in Hamlet besides the fall of Adam and Eve involve delay, and Elizabethans would have known each story[1]: 1. After King David’s affair with Bathsheba and arranging for the death of her husband, the prophet Nathan could have simply confronted David with his sins, but delayed to use a story to catch the king’s conscience (2 Sam 12:1-7). [2] - This is echoed in Hamlet’s use of the play to catch the conscience of the king [2.2.634]. ~~ 2. David spared King Saul when he had two chances to kill him, which delayed David’s ascension to the throne [3]. - These David-Saul tales are echoed (with a dark twist) in Hamlet’s choice not to kill Claudius at prayer [3.3.80-100]. ~~ 3. Jonah fled west to Tarshish when he was called to prophesy to Nineveh (Jonah 1:1-3), delaying his prophecy. After a storm and being thrown overboard, Jonah is swallowed by a fish God sends to take him back east to do his task [4]. - Jonah’s westward voyage and east-bound transfer from ship ...

INSTEAD OF ASKING WHY HAMLET DELAYS, let's ask: Why does Shakespeare write Hamlet that way?  Besides the execution of two wives of Henry VIII, and of many Catholics accused of treason, including Shakespeare’s relative Edward Arden in 1583 [1], what figurative ghosts may have made a cautious Shakespeare write a cautious Hamlet?  1. In February 1587, Mary, Queen of Scots was executed in England for conspiring against Queen Elizabeth I, her cousin. She was found guilty and beheaded. 2. In 1594, Ferdinando Stanley, patron of the Lord Strange's Men (in which Shakespeare and many of his fellow players were active) and possible heir to Elizabeth’s throne, was poisoned after faithfully reporting a plot against Elizabeth I that may have been intended to entrap him [2].  3. In February, 1601, Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, attempted a rebellion against the English government, a year and a half before Shakespeare's Hamlet first appeared in the stationer's registry (July 1602), an...

The main reason for Hamlet's delay: So that Shakespeare could write his play. Joking, of course. But absolutely serious. We can say we're impatient because we love quick and bloody revenge plots. ACTION FIGURE HAMLET! But if that's what we want, we're at the wrong play. Instead, we might choose not to be impatient because at least sometimes, we might prefer for princes to be careful to discern the truth about whether ghosts are honest, and whether kings are guilty, and whether princes who contemplate revenge are bound for heaven or “th’ other place”, as Hamlet calls it [4.3.38-9]. We might find that we like Hamlet humbly scolding himself for his own delay, and laugh at all the critics who take his impatient self-scolding too seriously, or too literally - as if Hamlet should act more quickly. Such critics may not notice how necessary it is for the play, to have Hamlet delay while Shakespeare explicates his character and that of others, and develops his plot. THE STORY:...

IN HAMLET'S PLACE, WWOD? (What would Othello do?) At some point [1], to help understand (or make fun of?) Hamlet’s apparent indecision, someone thought this question was important, or clever. If Othello were the Prince of Denmark, he would elope with Ophelia, kill her, kill his uncle, kill Fortinbras, and commit suicide. Done. A Kenneth Branagh film version might only take 3.8 hours, tops.  Such comparisons may or may not be helpful, but they add levity to the classroom and ensure that all students might get at least one answer right on the quiz.  What would avenge a father’s death more quickly: Superman or a nuclear bomb?  Woah!  Bambi and Rambo: Both names end in a vowel, announcing their similarity in spite of their contrast.  Bring those dear MIA members of the herd home. With grenades and lots of ammo. Get ‘er done. Boom.  Shakespeare would love these comparisons. How do we know? Because of the intentional fallacy, by that comic duo, Wimsatt and Beard...

Shakespeare catches the conscience of audiences impatient for action: 1. Speaking to the ghost, Hamlet says he’ll act with wings swift as... lightning? Nope. As “meditation or thoughts of love” [1.5.36]. In other words, NOT SWIFT. He's not planning swiftness but caution. 2. After the players arrive, Hamlet scolds himself for cowardice: "O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I! [...] A dull and muddy-mettled rascal, [...] I am pigeon-livered" [2]. Whether or not we condone revenge, we may admire Hamlet scolding himself for apparent cowardice.  3. Hamlet ends this speech saying he needs to be more certain of the ghost’s honesty and Claudius’ guilt, so he’ll put on a play to catch the conscience of the king [3]. This may inspire a public confession from Claudius. If not, then what should Hamlet do?  4. Next act: To be or not? Should Hamlet patiently tolerate the scandal of his father's murder and his mother's hasty remarriage - "suffer / The slings and arrows o...

In the final scene, why does Hamlet tell Horatio, “We defy augury” [1]?  Hamlet refers to scripture often in this part of the scene - “The readiness is all” [2], “the fall of a sparrow” [3]. But augury? What might that have meant to Elizabethan audiences?  Generally, augury is related to the belief in omens and signs, as mentioned by Horatio in the first scene of the play when he speaks of omens in Roman graveyards and in the heavens,  “the like precurse of feared events, As harbingers preceding still the fates And prologue to the omen coming on”. [4]  Augury in the story of the founding of Rome involved Romulus and Remus observing birds to determine fate or the will of the gods: The two had survived their great uncle’s attempt to drown them (and are adopted by a she-wolf, perhaps as Laertes is figuratively adopted and manipulated by Claudius?); they argued about where to locate the city. They decided to use augury to settle the dispute, but still argued about the ou...

Jeremy McCarter [1] has a good New York Times opinion piece, “Listen to ‘Hamlet.’ Feel Better” Access requires subscription [2]. Favorite bits: ~~~ “It is we who are Hamlet,” wrote the essayist and critic William Hazlitt. [....] His circumstances may not match yours [...] but, after the traumas of the past few years, Hamlet’s sorrow is likely to feel familiar, as is his sense of powerlessness. Amid political unrest, military deployments in the streets, an unfolding climate crisis and the unforeseeable, possibly apocalyptic disruptions of A.I., who among us hasn’t felt, as Hamlet does, that “the time is out of joint”? [....] According to the textbooks, a tragedy is a story in which a hero tumbles from a lofty height. But when we first meet Hamlet, he’s already in the dumps: grief-stricken by the sudden death of his father and appalled by everything that has followed. [....] In scene after scene that follows, new discoveries violate his sense of reality, bombarding him with what he cal...

If we think the main reason that Shakespeare named Hamlet’s uncle “Claudius” was because it was the English Renaissance – so things associated with ancient Rome were fashionable – we might miss the main point [1].  To have Claudius be a murderous, usurping, incestuous, unrepentant sinner, and to have Hamlet mention Nero [2], reveals a great deal about religious-political assumptions of Shakespeare’s time. Claudius is in fact like the Rome of Protestant polemics: MURDEROUS, POISONING, CONSPIRING, UNREPENTANT: Catholic Rome was viewed as corrupt and unrepentantly sinful, resisting reform. Rome excommunicated Elizabeth I (1570, 1588) [3]; English Catholics made numerous efforts to assassinate her [4]. Reformers associated the Mass with poison [5]; scholars call the poison cup of Claudius a “black Mass” [6]. INCESTUOUS: Rome had approved the “incestuous marriage” of Henry VIII to his brother’s widow, and if Elizabeth had accepted the marriage proposal of her brother-in-law Philip II of...

What if we consider Claudius, uncle of Hamlet, through the lens of Philip II of Spain, or vice versa?  Philip was married to Mary I, older half-sister of Elizabeth I, and as such, he also enjoyed the title of King of England.  As Elizabeth’s brother-in-law, she was Philip’s “sometime-sister,” a phrase Claudius uses to describe Gertrude, widow of his brother King Hamlet [1].  Philip had offered a marriage proposal to Elizabeth (1559) two months after the death of Mary I (hasty remarriage), in spite of being the widower of Elizabeth’s half-sister (which would have required special dispensation from Rome, as did the marriage of Henry VIII to his first wife, Katherine of Aragon, mother of Mary I); this would have been considered a biblically incestuous marriage.  [Edit: Elizabeth *did not accept*. ]  There were coins of England during the monarchy of Mary I that featured images of Mary and Philip, some of which are still in existence, although Elizabeth had a majo...

Emily Dickinson famously wrote, “Tell the truth, but tell it slant” [1]. In the character of Claudius, Shakespeare does this in a number of ways: He retells an old Danish tale about a murderous king who married his brother’s widow (echoes of Henry VIII [2]). He changes the uncle’s name from Feng to Claudius, associating him not only with literary villains in Arthurian tales [3.a., 3.b.] and in Chaucer [4], but also with Rome and two Roman emperors - Claudius II, who ordered the execution of St. Valentine (as King Claudius ordered the execution of Ophelia’s Valentine) [5], and Claudius I, who married his niece and invaded England [6]. Shakespeare associated the uncle with Rome in these ways during the English Reformation, when Protestantism and Rome were at odds, executing traitors and heretics; when Elizabeth had been excommunicated by two Roman Catholic popes [7]; and when Rome enlisted Philip II of Spain (who had proposed to Elizabeth in 1559) and its Armada to attempt invasions of...