Inclusivity, and the Owl as a Baker's Daugther
BEING INCLUSIVE ABOUT RELIGIOUS ALLUSIONS IN HAMLET /&/ WHAT'S AN OWL GOT TO DO WITH A BAKER'S DAUGHTER?
My goal in writing Hamlet’s Bible is to be as inclusive as possible in explaining biblical and religious allusions in the play. I hope to do this, not only to appeal to the broadest possible audience, but also because it simply helps if the goal is to understand Shakespeare’s rich use of religious and biblical allusions.
It is my firm conviction that one does not have to be a Christian, or to have ever attended church, to understand the biblical allusions in the play once they're pointed out and explained. It just means that, for those unfamiliar with Christianity and the bible, it may take a bit more explaining.
It is a basic fact that readers of Shakespeare today are much more diverse than in Elizabethan times. Even in nations with so-called Christian majorities, college and high school instructors of English Literature have students with a great variety of religious backgrounds, many not Christian, and even among Christian students, many unfamiliar with bible stories and the range of Shakespeare’s biblical allusions. Add to all of this the problem of modern bible translations being different in many ways, which makes allusions to older translations more difficult to recognize, and an inclusive and patient approach becomes an even greater necessity.
In the end, being inclusive will require me to grasp and sometimes explain or at least touch on at least three categories of historical contexts: 1) The Elizabethan cultural context; 2) the various contexts in which the bible passages alluded to were written; and 3) some of the range of cultural contexts of my readers.
For some readers, Christianity may have positive associations; for others, negative ones; and for many of us, both. There's no avoiding the fact that religion, especially Christianity after its adoption by Constantine, has often been used as a weapon rather than as a balm, and the religious/political feuding between England and Rome during the English Renaissance is no exception. E.M.W. Tillyard (The Elizabethan World Picture) describes the Elizabethan political, religious and social world as strongly hierarchical. There’s truth in that, and it was often hierarchical in very negative ways. But the Elizabethan biblical worldview also recognized that prophets could come from among the lowly to speak truth to power in non-hierarchical ways.
So how to explain the religious/biblical worldview of the Elizabethan era as represented by Shakespeare, in a religiously inclusive way, accurate not only to the hierarchical aspects, but also the non-hierarchical?
At best (when we're not considering it as a hammer in search of a nail), it seems the biblical worldview represented by Shakespeare - like many religions - is about a kind of gift economy (as described by Lewis Hyde in his book, “The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property”). We don’t create ourselves, and our parents didn’t create their own biological capacity to conceive and bear children, so life comes to us like a gift from an unseen giver. For modern readers and for the sake of inclusiveness, we can stress “like” rather than any sort of direct, literal supernatural determinism. When awakened to a gift, we feel a sense of gratitude; at best, this gratitude often moves or inspires us to labor to become like the gift or giver, and to pay back and pay forward some share of what we have received.
Hyde calls this the “labor of gratitude” in a chapter by that name. He applies the term broadly, in more than just a religious sense, but also narrowly, in relation to art. Christianity has labors of gratitude that go by other names, such as catechism, prayer, and works of mercy.
In Christian baptism, the language of the ritual (for both Catholics and the English Church in their Book of Common Prayer) says that the person is baptized into the death of Christ so as to die to sin and rise anew in him. It recognizes not only the gift of existence in the first place, but also gifts of grace (help) from God, and potentially, eternal salvation.
This may sound easy to some, but Shakespeare often shows that it’s a life-long labor of gratitude, more easily said than done. If it seems that life comes to us like a gift from an unseen giver, then we might observe (very broadly) that laboring to become more like that gift or giver might bring us into greater harmony with the forces of the universe. Yet if one never does the labor of gratitude, even in an unconscious way, then one tends not to become like the gift or the giver, and though offered grace, it might never really be ours. We know from experience with neighbors, friendship and romance, that to be a good neighbor, friend or lover, it doesn't help to be a selfish jerk. We labor to become like the best gifts we receive, or their givers, and that labor makes those gifts more fully ours: The person who has benefited from the kindness and patience of others, and who becomes patient and kind, has received those gifts more fully than the ungrateful person who remains an impatient grump.
Christianity has long said that the goal is to become more Christ-like. While to some, Christianity may seem (very accurately) self-righteous and judgmental, Shakespeare seems to have had a special place in his heart for the gospel quote, “Judge not, that ye be not judged. For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged, and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured unto you again” (Matthew 7:1-3). He not only alluded to this (and the "mote of dust" passage after it) frequently in his plays, but also named one of his plays after it (Measure for Measure). This theme of the need for being merciful in judging others is a common one, present in the theistic religions of Islam, Christianity and Judaism: As God is merciful with us, we should be merciful with others. (And this is clearly a theme in Hamlet, where the prince notes, "Use every man after his desert, and who should 'scape whipping?")
Centuries earlier, the church had defined the “Seven Deadly Sins” (pride, covetousness, lust, anger, gluttony, envy, and sloth), and it doesn’t take much for a wide range of readers to recognize how Elizabethans would see these as sins or vices. In the language of Hamlet and the bible, individuals and society often seem like untended gardens, and sin in a personal or collective sense can seem like weeds. The church had also defined corporal and spiritual works of mercy (seven each) as a counter to sin, and these works of mercy, as well as the sins, had been represented in paintings for hundreds of years before Shakespeare and included in Christian catechism, the teaching of Christian children.
Much of this is common sense and based on such things as the Golden Rule: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” (or in the negative, “Do not do unto others that which you would not done unto you”). Author Karen Armstrong notes that some version of the Golden Rule is included in all of the world’s major religions, and that it’s a moral guideline on which many atheists and agnostics might also agree.
The gospels claim that when Jesus was asked what was the most important law in Judaism, he said the most important was to love God with all your heart, soul, and mind; but the second most important, he said, was like it: To love neighbor as self (which the Golden Rule paraphrased). Further, he said that the whole of the law and the prophets was based on these two. And in fact, other gospel quotes have Jesus saying that the second is a kind of test of the first: Whatever you do unto “the least of these, you do unto me,” he claims. So if you don’t care for the poor, the sick, the imprisoned, the leper, the most vulnerable, then you are demonstrating similar indifference toward transcendent meaning and the "heavenly" source of all gifts.
Shakespeare understood this, and his frequent playfulness with language about kings and beggars indicates his awareness of “the least of these,” and not only the lack of compassion shown toward them, but also how quickly and easily a usurped king can become a beggar, or how a fish can eat of a worm that ate of the corpse of a king, and a beggar eat the fish, and so a king goes a "progress" through the guts of a beggar (as Hamlet says). If kings are not good servants of the "least of these" now, worms and the fish that eat them may help them become better servants of the poor eventually. The Luke 16:19–31 story of Lazarus and the Rich Man (Dives, in Latin) is yet another exploration of this theme, and elements of this tale are alluded to in Hamlet.
Ophelia's reference to the Owl as a baker's daughter is in fact a reference to a story in which a baker's daughter fails to show compassion and generosity toward a beggar, who was Christ in disguise; as a kind of punishment, she is changed into an owl, whose incessant question is, "Who? Who?" In other words, who is this beggar at the door? It may be an angel in disguise as claimed in the bible: "Do not forget to show hospitality to strangers, for by so doing some people have shown hospitality to angels without knowing it." (Hebrews 13:2). ** Some part of Ophelia may regret that she obeyed her father and rejected Hamlet, even as the fabled baker's daughter rejected the beggar. This is also a repeated theme in saint stories, where St. Martin and St. Francis show compassion toward the beggar or the sick, and later, in a dream, they learn that it was Jesus to whom they gave assistance. What we do to "the least of these" tests and reveals whether, in fact, we have any love for the transcendent, and whether we can transcend our often-selfish selves a bit through generosity and compassion.
[** * See page 375, The Riddles of Hamlet and the Newest Answers, 1917, by Simon Augustine Blackmore, 1848-1926, Boston, Stratford Co., available online at this link:
https://archive.org/details/riddlesofhamletn00blac/page/n7/mode/2up
See also Richard Finkelstein, "Differentiating 'Hamlet': Ophelia and the Problems of Subjectivity"
in Renaissance and Reformation Vol: 21 No: 2 Date: 1997 Pages: 5-22
OCLC - 5884807087; ISSN - 0034429X
From page 15: Not having responded to Hamlet's entreaty after his soliloquy on action, she is later "the owl [that] was a baker's daughter" — the daughter Jesus turned into an owl because she did not respond generously to his request for bread.
and Finkelstein's FN 27:
27. See note to 4.5.42 in The Riverside Shakespeare, eds. G. Blakemore Evans et al. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974), p. 1173.]
[In a way, the story of the baker's daughter changed into an owl is a retelling of the story of the rich man (like the baker and his daughter) and Lazarus (like the beggar at the baker's door.)]
And of course, we would do well to recall that the question of the owl is also the first word spoken in the play, as Bernardo asks Francisco, "Who's there?"
We don't have to believe that heaven is populated with winged angels, or that they shape-shift into beggars at will, or that the resurrection of Jesus was literally a resuscitation of a corpse, to grasp that this system of metaphors points people toward striving to be generous and kind toward one another rather than selfish.
Christian Theologians sometimes speak of love of God as a vertical axis, and love of neighbor (the Golden Rule) as a horizontal one, the two of these neatly making a cross. But this employs flawed spacial metaphors that locate God above and humanity below. As others have noted, on a semi-spherical planet, down can be up, and one man's star-strewn heavens can be below another woman's basement; one person can be tanning in the sun while, elsewhere on the distracted globe, people sleep through the night. Many of the old metaphors no longer hold. But witty Shakespeare often loved testing metaphors and finding their breaking points.
In the end, the task of being inclusive, at times, will be a matter of explaining older historical contexts and recognizing aspects of our own. It will also require being open-minded and critical of my own biases, and finding ways to understand and explain biblical allusions that can appeal to readers who don’t come to the plays from a perspective of religious faith, or whose religious background is very different from that of the playwright’s and my own.
Do you have any thoughts about the challenge of explaining biblical allusions in Shakespeare to readers who might not be people of faith, or might come from religious contexts other than Christianity? Feel free to share your thoughts. I'm lucky to have connections with many expert teachers, scholars, actors and directors, and would benefit from your perspectives.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Links to a description of my book project:
On LinkedIn: https://lnkd.in/eJGBtqV
On this blog: https://pauladrianfried.blogspot.com/2017/05/hamlets-bible-my-book-project-im.html
[Originally posted around the week of 8/2/17 on LinkedIn]
My goal in writing Hamlet’s Bible is to be as inclusive as possible in explaining biblical and religious allusions in the play. I hope to do this, not only to appeal to the broadest possible audience, but also because it simply helps if the goal is to understand Shakespeare’s rich use of religious and biblical allusions.
It is my firm conviction that one does not have to be a Christian, or to have ever attended church, to understand the biblical allusions in the play once they're pointed out and explained. It just means that, for those unfamiliar with Christianity and the bible, it may take a bit more explaining.
It is a basic fact that readers of Shakespeare today are much more diverse than in Elizabethan times. Even in nations with so-called Christian majorities, college and high school instructors of English Literature have students with a great variety of religious backgrounds, many not Christian, and even among Christian students, many unfamiliar with bible stories and the range of Shakespeare’s biblical allusions. Add to all of this the problem of modern bible translations being different in many ways, which makes allusions to older translations more difficult to recognize, and an inclusive and patient approach becomes an even greater necessity.
In the end, being inclusive will require me to grasp and sometimes explain or at least touch on at least three categories of historical contexts: 1) The Elizabethan cultural context; 2) the various contexts in which the bible passages alluded to were written; and 3) some of the range of cultural contexts of my readers.
For some readers, Christianity may have positive associations; for others, negative ones; and for many of us, both. There's no avoiding the fact that religion, especially Christianity after its adoption by Constantine, has often been used as a weapon rather than as a balm, and the religious/political feuding between England and Rome during the English Renaissance is no exception. E.M.W. Tillyard (The Elizabethan World Picture) describes the Elizabethan political, religious and social world as strongly hierarchical. There’s truth in that, and it was often hierarchical in very negative ways. But the Elizabethan biblical worldview also recognized that prophets could come from among the lowly to speak truth to power in non-hierarchical ways.
So how to explain the religious/biblical worldview of the Elizabethan era as represented by Shakespeare, in a religiously inclusive way, accurate not only to the hierarchical aspects, but also the non-hierarchical?
At best (when we're not considering it as a hammer in search of a nail), it seems the biblical worldview represented by Shakespeare - like many religions - is about a kind of gift economy (as described by Lewis Hyde in his book, “The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property”). We don’t create ourselves, and our parents didn’t create their own biological capacity to conceive and bear children, so life comes to us like a gift from an unseen giver. For modern readers and for the sake of inclusiveness, we can stress “like” rather than any sort of direct, literal supernatural determinism. When awakened to a gift, we feel a sense of gratitude; at best, this gratitude often moves or inspires us to labor to become like the gift or giver, and to pay back and pay forward some share of what we have received.
Hyde calls this the “labor of gratitude” in a chapter by that name. He applies the term broadly, in more than just a religious sense, but also narrowly, in relation to art. Christianity has labors of gratitude that go by other names, such as catechism, prayer, and works of mercy.
In Christian baptism, the language of the ritual (for both Catholics and the English Church in their Book of Common Prayer) says that the person is baptized into the death of Christ so as to die to sin and rise anew in him. It recognizes not only the gift of existence in the first place, but also gifts of grace (help) from God, and potentially, eternal salvation.
This may sound easy to some, but Shakespeare often shows that it’s a life-long labor of gratitude, more easily said than done. If it seems that life comes to us like a gift from an unseen giver, then we might observe (very broadly) that laboring to become more like that gift or giver might bring us into greater harmony with the forces of the universe. Yet if one never does the labor of gratitude, even in an unconscious way, then one tends not to become like the gift or the giver, and though offered grace, it might never really be ours. We know from experience with neighbors, friendship and romance, that to be a good neighbor, friend or lover, it doesn't help to be a selfish jerk. We labor to become like the best gifts we receive, or their givers, and that labor makes those gifts more fully ours: The person who has benefited from the kindness and patience of others, and who becomes patient and kind, has received those gifts more fully than the ungrateful person who remains an impatient grump.
Christianity has long said that the goal is to become more Christ-like. While to some, Christianity may seem (very accurately) self-righteous and judgmental, Shakespeare seems to have had a special place in his heart for the gospel quote, “Judge not, that ye be not judged. For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged, and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured unto you again” (Matthew 7:1-3). He not only alluded to this (and the "mote of dust" passage after it) frequently in his plays, but also named one of his plays after it (Measure for Measure). This theme of the need for being merciful in judging others is a common one, present in the theistic religions of Islam, Christianity and Judaism: As God is merciful with us, we should be merciful with others. (And this is clearly a theme in Hamlet, where the prince notes, "Use every man after his desert, and who should 'scape whipping?")
Centuries earlier, the church had defined the “Seven Deadly Sins” (pride, covetousness, lust, anger, gluttony, envy, and sloth), and it doesn’t take much for a wide range of readers to recognize how Elizabethans would see these as sins or vices. In the language of Hamlet and the bible, individuals and society often seem like untended gardens, and sin in a personal or collective sense can seem like weeds. The church had also defined corporal and spiritual works of mercy (seven each) as a counter to sin, and these works of mercy, as well as the sins, had been represented in paintings for hundreds of years before Shakespeare and included in Christian catechism, the teaching of Christian children.
Much of this is common sense and based on such things as the Golden Rule: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” (or in the negative, “Do not do unto others that which you would not done unto you”). Author Karen Armstrong notes that some version of the Golden Rule is included in all of the world’s major religions, and that it’s a moral guideline on which many atheists and agnostics might also agree.
The gospels claim that when Jesus was asked what was the most important law in Judaism, he said the most important was to love God with all your heart, soul, and mind; but the second most important, he said, was like it: To love neighbor as self (which the Golden Rule paraphrased). Further, he said that the whole of the law and the prophets was based on these two. And in fact, other gospel quotes have Jesus saying that the second is a kind of test of the first: Whatever you do unto “the least of these, you do unto me,” he claims. So if you don’t care for the poor, the sick, the imprisoned, the leper, the most vulnerable, then you are demonstrating similar indifference toward transcendent meaning and the "heavenly" source of all gifts.
Shakespeare understood this, and his frequent playfulness with language about kings and beggars indicates his awareness of “the least of these,” and not only the lack of compassion shown toward them, but also how quickly and easily a usurped king can become a beggar, or how a fish can eat of a worm that ate of the corpse of a king, and a beggar eat the fish, and so a king goes a "progress" through the guts of a beggar (as Hamlet says). If kings are not good servants of the "least of these" now, worms and the fish that eat them may help them become better servants of the poor eventually. The Luke 16:19–31 story of Lazarus and the Rich Man (Dives, in Latin) is yet another exploration of this theme, and elements of this tale are alluded to in Hamlet.
Ophelia's reference to the Owl as a baker's daughter is in fact a reference to a story in which a baker's daughter fails to show compassion and generosity toward a beggar, who was Christ in disguise; as a kind of punishment, she is changed into an owl, whose incessant question is, "Who? Who?" In other words, who is this beggar at the door? It may be an angel in disguise as claimed in the bible: "Do not forget to show hospitality to strangers, for by so doing some people have shown hospitality to angels without knowing it." (Hebrews 13:2). ** Some part of Ophelia may regret that she obeyed her father and rejected Hamlet, even as the fabled baker's daughter rejected the beggar. This is also a repeated theme in saint stories, where St. Martin and St. Francis show compassion toward the beggar or the sick, and later, in a dream, they learn that it was Jesus to whom they gave assistance. What we do to "the least of these" tests and reveals whether, in fact, we have any love for the transcendent, and whether we can transcend our often-selfish selves a bit through generosity and compassion.
[** * See page 375, The Riddles of Hamlet and the Newest Answers, 1917, by Simon Augustine Blackmore, 1848-1926, Boston, Stratford Co., available online at this link:
https://archive.org/details/riddlesofhamletn00blac/page/n7/mode/2up
See also Richard Finkelstein, "Differentiating 'Hamlet': Ophelia and the Problems of Subjectivity"
in Renaissance and Reformation Vol: 21 No: 2 Date: 1997 Pages: 5-22
OCLC - 5884807087; ISSN - 0034429X
From page 15: Not having responded to Hamlet's entreaty after his soliloquy on action, she is later "the owl [that] was a baker's daughter" — the daughter Jesus turned into an owl because she did not respond generously to his request for bread.
and Finkelstein's FN 27:
27. See note to 4.5.42 in The Riverside Shakespeare, eds. G. Blakemore Evans et al. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974), p. 1173.]
[In a way, the story of the baker's daughter changed into an owl is a retelling of the story of the rich man (like the baker and his daughter) and Lazarus (like the beggar at the baker's door.)]
And of course, we would do well to recall that the question of the owl is also the first word spoken in the play, as Bernardo asks Francisco, "Who's there?"
We don't have to believe that heaven is populated with winged angels, or that they shape-shift into beggars at will, or that the resurrection of Jesus was literally a resuscitation of a corpse, to grasp that this system of metaphors points people toward striving to be generous and kind toward one another rather than selfish.
Christian Theologians sometimes speak of love of God as a vertical axis, and love of neighbor (the Golden Rule) as a horizontal one, the two of these neatly making a cross. But this employs flawed spacial metaphors that locate God above and humanity below. As others have noted, on a semi-spherical planet, down can be up, and one man's star-strewn heavens can be below another woman's basement; one person can be tanning in the sun while, elsewhere on the distracted globe, people sleep through the night. Many of the old metaphors no longer hold. But witty Shakespeare often loved testing metaphors and finding their breaking points.
In the end, the task of being inclusive, at times, will be a matter of explaining older historical contexts and recognizing aspects of our own. It will also require being open-minded and critical of my own biases, and finding ways to understand and explain biblical allusions that can appeal to readers who don’t come to the plays from a perspective of religious faith, or whose religious background is very different from that of the playwright’s and my own.
Do you have any thoughts about the challenge of explaining biblical allusions in Shakespeare to readers who might not be people of faith, or might come from religious contexts other than Christianity? Feel free to share your thoughts. I'm lucky to have connections with many expert teachers, scholars, actors and directors, and would benefit from your perspectives.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Links to a description of my book project:
On LinkedIn: https://lnkd.in/eJGBtqV
On this blog: https://pauladrianfried.blogspot.com/2017/05/hamlets-bible-my-book-project-im.html
[Originally posted around the week of 8/2/17 on LinkedIn]
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