Paul Adrian Fried / HAMLET'S BIBLE

[Detail from painting of the Transfiguration, by Raphael] ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ In Hamlet’s meeting with the ghost in act 1, scenes 4-5, there is a dark and ironic variation on the Transfiguration, as told in the gospels (Mt 17:1–, Mk 9:2–, Lk 9:28–): Gospels: Jesus goes up on a mountain with three disciples: James, Peter, and the beloved John. Hamlet: the prince initially gets news of the ghost from three: Marcellus, Bernardo, and beloved friend Horatio. - All three, plus Hamlet, speak of Hamlet keeping watch with them that night, like Jesus with James, Peter, and the beloved John. Later, perhaps for dramatic efficiency's sake, Bernardo does not join them for the watch, so Hamlet goes to meet the ghost with only two, Horatio and Marcellus. Gospels: Jesus is transfigured in light and speaks with Elijah and Moses. Hamlet wears black and is darkly transfigured toward madness and revenge after speaking with the ghost who claims to be h...

Here's a fascinating article on archaeological research to find the location of a battle won by Alexander the Great in 331 BCE, probably located in Nineveh, the city to which the Hebrew prophet Jonah was sent. https://www.triesteallnews.it/2019/04/16/iraq-archeologi-di-udine-scoprono-il-sito-della-battaglia-di-gaugamela/ The book of Jonah is dated as having been written in 4th/5th century BCE (though it references events in the reign of Jeroboam II, 786–746 BC). So the book of Jonah may have been written as a veiled commentary on Alexander's victory there? This may be old news to Hebrew scripture scholars, but it's a new insight for me, coming at the topic via my interest in the Jonah echo in Shakespeare's Hamlet. I found this via Mirella Granelli on LinkedIn. Thanks, @Mirella! In the journal Clio (III, 1974, 111-128), Paul Jorgensen's essay, "Elizabethan ideas of war in Hamlet," contrasts two ways that nations relate to God regarding state corru...

The Rocky Mountain Medieval & Renaissance Association (RMMRA) conference in Denver, April 11-13, was amazing, very thought-provoking and affirming, so while still glowing, I wanted to share a few things about how it went and what impressed me. First, I volunteered to chair a session about male shame and honor in medieval texts, including the poem, "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight." Three graduate students in the Institute for Medieval Studies at The University of New Mexico presented papers. To prepare, I read some literature on the psychology of shame, and also reviewed some literature on gift economies (Lewis Hyde's The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property , a cult favorite). The presenters seemed to assume at first that it was a binary: Either honor or shame, and that this was mostly related to warrior culture. In fact, I found that gift dynamics are inextricably tied in with these other dynamics of violence, honor, and shame, and I would go so far a...

I recently received news that one of my poems was accepted to be published in the sidewalk poetry project in the town where I live, Northfield, Minnesota. Northfield is home to two colleges (St. Olaf and Carleton), and in part because of that, has a relatively high interest in the arts: Though our population is only slightly over 20,000, we actually have an arts commissioner (the current one was formerly a local school principal, and is a personal friend). The judges deliberated without knowing who wrote the poems (we submitted without any names on the pages with our poems), and mine was one of those chosen. In recent years, I have tried a few ABC poems in the style of former US poet laureate Robert Pinsky, whose poem in that form was published in the New York Review of Books; I discovered it when Dustin Hoffman recited it from memory on the Charlie Rose show. His ABC poem with one word per letter of the alphabet, in order. I have been experimenting in this form, taking the al...

In 2016, Gary Taylor, editor of the New Oxford Shakespeare, explained in a BBC article that Christopher Marlowe was being credited in their latest edition of the plays as co-writer of some of the plays long attributed to Shakespeare alone. But if there's a hint of Marlowe's voice in some of the plays, where does that come from? Marlowe himself? or some other Marlowe-influenced source? Carol Rutter of the University of Warwick thinks it wasn't Christopher Marlowe directly, but Shakespeare's fellow actors and their knowledge of Marlowe's plays from performing them, that influenced the plays: This is an important conversation to have, especially when scholars of Shakespeare are often not playwrights themselves, and with only scholarly knowledge of the creative process rather than first-hand knowledge.

This week I am headed to Denver, Colorado, for a meeting of the Rocky Mountain Medieval and Renaissance Association (instead of attending the Shakespeare Association of America conference in Washington D.C., which was tempting for its proximity to the Folger Shakespeare Library). I am presenting a paper called “How Gadamer Might Rethink Shakespeare & the Bible,” in which I consider how a Protestant bias of “Scripture Alone” (Sola Scriptura), and an empirical bias of the emerging sciences in the mid-1800s, established an early tradition that favored very literal references in biblical allusions that utilized biblical names and phrases, over paraphrase and plot echo, which are often relatively neglected by many of the main reference books in the field. (Darwin's book, On the Origin of Species , was published just five years before Charles Wordsworth's 1864 book on Shakespeare and the Bible, and it, too, is obsessed with empirical evidence and close observation). These b...