Paul Adrian Fried / HAMLET'S BIBLE

“My goal, in short, is to help explain Shakespeare, not to endorse the religion he had or the religion he became. But we cannot fully grasp Shakespeare’s own aims, I argue, until we come to terms with those religions too.” Jeffrey Knapp, 2002, Shakespeare's Tribe There is a sort of hinge in Shakespeare’s Hamlet , built on a contrast or sometimes proposed complementarity of love and fear. There is also a universe of Yoda memes on the internet, many of them dealing with Master Yoda’s thoughts on the dangers of fear and the Dark Side. What might Yoda and Hamlet have in common regarding the themes of love and fear? Early in the play, we learn that Hamlet would rather speak of mutual love with his sentinels and his friend Horatio, than hear them profess anything about their duty to serve him. We also learn of Hamlet’s great love expressed in letters to Ophelia. It seems Prince Hamlet would, by far, prefer to dedicate himself to love rather than to revenge. Laertes, howeve...

Tony Tambasco has a good blog post about Shakespeare's play, All's Well That Ends Well, a play title which he notes could be paraphrased as "the ends justify the means," suggesting the play is humorously critical of such thinking. You can read his blog post here . Tambasco explains that the plot of this play involves a woman, Helena, who wishes to marry Bertram, and who tricks him into non-consensual sex, which many countries today would consider rape. He opens his blog post with a comment about how the #MeToo movement and other cultural developments have made Shakespeare's play, Measure for Measure, much more popular, but we should also be considering the rape of Bertram by Helena at this time in history. He notes that because of patriarchy in Shakespeare's England, women often lacked agency (a theme, I would add, that also comes up in Jane Austin's novels regarding the limited options for women and the way they often depended on advantageous marr...

I have been reading Julia Reinhard Lupton's good book, Thinking with Shakespeare , with special attention, of course, to the chapter on Hamlet , which is very rich in that it's challenging me to think in ways outside of my previous habits. This blog post is not to share any of Lupton's ideas in particular, though I hope to do so in a future post, especially regarding her mention of Moses as related to Hamlet seeing his father's ghost. Sometimes when I research, I mark or copy down quotes and ideas I think I can use. Other times, while the text I'm reading is about A, B, and C, my mind leaps, and I'm thinking of J,K,L. It's a mysterious process. I am not a fan of saying the Catholic Rosary, but I have heard some say that the prayers of the rosary are meant to occupy and distract your ego or consious mind (or "monkey mind"), which allows other insights to surface or breakthroughs to occur. This is what I mean by stumbling upon J-K-L while doing r...

In Hamlet act 3, scene 1, Ophelia's father Polonius asks her to read a book so that she might project "devotion's image" and "pious action" as well as her own loneliness when Prince Hamlet first sees her. In other words, he is using her for bait to trap Hamlet into conversation while Claudius and Polonius eavesdrop. I have written about this scene in a previous blog post regarding the echoes of the story of Suzannah and the Elders , from the book of Daniel. But today I want to note a visual echo of the Annunciation of Mary, when an angel visits to tell her that she is to bear a son, Jesus. [See Bridget Gellert Lyons, "The Iconography of Ophelia," page 61: "The woman with a book was reminiscent of countless representations of the Virgin, who was most commonly shown reading when the Angel of the Annunciation came to visit her." ELH , Spring, 1977, Vol. 44, No. 1, pp. 60-74 https://www.jstor.org/stable/2872526 ] In her remarka...