Paul Adrian Fried / HAMLET'S BIBLE

HAMLET AS SERVANT-PRINCE: A PARAPHRASED & OFTEN-MISSED BIBLE ALLUSION: Hamlet: I am glad to see you well. Horatio! - or I do forget myself. Horatio: The same, my lord, and your poor servant ever. Hamlet: Sir, my good friend - I'll change that name with you. Four key Shakespeare & the Bible scholars missed this, while Peter Milward (on the tragedies) caught it: Hamlet says he would be his friend Horatio’s “poor servant,” not the other way around. This alludes to multiple gospel passages in which Jesus says that if you would be greatest, you must be servant of all (Matt 20:26; Mark 9:35; Luke 22:26) and that Jesus won’t call his disciples servants any longer, but friends (John 15:15), and he washes their feet to demonstrate such service (John 13:1-9). [IMAGE: Dirck van Baburen (circa 1594/1595–1624) / Christ Washing the Apostles Feet / circa 1616 / Public domain via Wikipedia.] Why does it matter? Along with Hamlet’s scolding of Polonius for his judgmental and

HAMLET'S BIBLE: MY BOOK PROJECT I’m writing a book about biblical influences, allusions and plot echoes in Hamlet, tentatively titled “Hamlet’s Bible.” Others since the 1860s have tried to document all known bible allusions in *all* of Shakespeare’s plays, and these are helpful reference books but have drawbacks: 1. Like many reference books, they often read like phone books. 2. The most up-to-date (Shaheen) is prohibitively expensive. 3. We usually read one play at a time; readers with limited exposure to a few plays are unlikely to invest in a reference book if they’d only use one chapter per play. 4. These books neglect paraphrased allusions & plot echoes. 5. They also lack historical and interpretive context. My students would say, “Ok, but what are the allusions doing there? What did they mean?” My book will ~ include essays about threads & clusters of biblical & religious allusions & plot echoes; ~ deal primarily with Hamlet, not all of Shakesp

C. ELLIOT BROWNE WROTE IN 1876 that the names of the first two characters on stage in Hamlet may allude to assassins in the Pazzi conspiracy.* Modern readers may think: Never heard of that! Are there Pazzi allusions in other Elizabethan plays? In a 1995 book, Frank Ardolino shows that Thomas Kyd’s play, The Spanish Tragedy—the best-known English revenge tragedy before Hamlet—contained allusions to the Pazzi conspiracy. If Kyd’s play did so, it’s easier to think that Hamlet contained them as well. But the sentinels in Hamlet are not assassins. And there are correspondences between stories of Francis of Assisi and Bernard of Clairvaux, and Hamlet - so the Pazzi allusion probably wasn’t the only thing on WS's mind. Q: But why might scholars have neglected the possibility that these names are allusions to the saints? A: England after the reformation, and Protestants after Luther in general, rejected the Catholic cult of the saints - and may have avoided painful memories of lost