The Winter’s Tale & Hamlet: Common Themes & Political Concerns?
If you have viewed the recently available Shakespeare's Globe production of The Winter's Tale (more information near the end of this blog post), you may have noticed many themes and story elements in common with Hamlet (and perhaps other Shakespeare plays as well). In fact, Hamlet and The Winter’s Tale share a number of important features that are perhaps instructive regarding the political interests and moral concerns of the time.
[Image via Shakespeare's Globe]
Consider:
Both Hamlet and The Winter’s Tale are about what is appropriate mourning for the dead:
- In Hamlet, the mourning by Gertrude of her husband's death, and by Claudius, of his brother's death, are too short in Hamlet's opinion.
- In The Winter’s Tale, in spite of the real need for Leontes to demonstrate a very real repentance for his grave mistakes, the mourning may seem too long.
- Hamlet involves suspected adultery, poisoning, conspiracy to poison, and revenge.
- The Winter’s Tale involves suspected adultery and conspiracy to poison as revenge.
- Hamlet has a character (Claudius) who speaks of being pulled in two directions by both happiness (regarding his marriage) and sorrow at his brother's death.
- The Winter’s Tale has a character (Paulina) who speaks of being pulled in two directions by both happiness (regarding the return and marriage of the princess) and sorrow at news of her husband's death.
- Hamlet includes a sea-voyage by the prince and his unexpected early return that helps bring the action of the play to a resolution that includes key reconciliations.
- The Winter’s Tale includes a sea-voyage by a princess and later, her unexpected return, which helps bring the action of the play to a resolution that includes key reconciliations.
- Hamlet is about a king who is killed by his brother, a brother who may have had an affair with the king’s wife before the king’s death, followed by a biblically incestuous marriage.
- The Winter’s Tale is about a king who is paranoid about the possibility that a friend, who was like a brother to him,* is having an affair with his wife and plotting to kill him. [* The word "brother" is used most often in the play between Leontes, King of Sicily, and his friend Polixenes, King of Bohemia. The "blood" of an apparent brother, being too friendly with Leontes' wife, feels nearly incestuous to the paranoid Leontes.]
- Hamlet includes a graveyard scene that echoes many aspects of the gospel tale about the disciples on the road to Emmaus, implying a kind of resurrection appearance of Yorick embodied in the gravedigger and in Yoricks skull.
- The Winter’s Tale, like Much Ado About Nothing, includes what seems to be a faked death and resurrection, as while Hermione may have been believed by all to have died, it seems that Paulina may have discovered that she was alive and kept her in a secret place for 16 years, if in fact Paulina didn't perhaps give to Hermione a potion like the priest gives to Juliet to make her appear to be dead. (Perhaps the details matter less than the faked death-and-resurrection? Does this imply that Shakespeare questioned the literal-historical nature of the resurrection, and believed it was, in part, redemptive fiction and theatrics?)
- Hamlet is a play in which the eventual repentance of the queen and prince may help inspire the a change of heart and confession of Laertes in the last act and exposure of the poison plot.
(See also here regarding Gertrude's influence and contingency with Hamlet, Laertes, and others.)
- The Winter’s Tale is a play in which the eventual long repentance of King Leontes may help to inspire a change of heart in his friend Polixenes, King of Bohemia, regarding the marriage of his son.
- Hamlet is in part about a prince of Denmark who makes oaths of love to a woman not of royal birth, and whose family tell her that she is unworthy of the match; later, in her apparent madness, she says “It is the false steward that stole his master's daughter” (4.5.2925), implying that perhaps she is worthy, at least figuratively a changeling, and her father had been a false steward.
- The Winter’s Tale is about a prince of Bohemia who declares his love for an apparent shepherd’s daughter; his father opposes the match, believing she is unworthy, but will later discover that she had been a changeling, the daughter of a king, a princess stolen away shortly after birth to save her life.
- Hamlet is about an ambitious, stubborn, murderous usurper-king who tries but fails to repent, causes the death of his own heir, and who later fails to save the life of his queen, and a prince who repents of his madness and violence only after his sea-voyage and brush with death.
- The Winter’s Tale is about a hard-hearted, stubborn and jealous king, who repents only after the death of his son and heir, and whose selfishness leads to the apparent death of his queen.
Can you think of other common themes and concerns between these two plays?
NODS TO THE OEDIPUS CYCLE
It is well known today that Freud saw in Hamlet an example of his Oedipal complex. But the Winter's Tale also gives a nod to the Oedipus cycle of Sophocles, by way of a character named Antigonus, a male version of Antigone, a daughter of Oedipus who is left for dead as punishment for seeking to bury one of her brothers (topic of last week's blog post here). Instead of seeking to bury the body of an already dead brother and prince, Antigonus swears that he will bear the infant princess Perdita far away to be abandoned to the elements, since her father believes she was conceived by another man. The princess is later found and saved by a shepherd. This connects the play not only to Antigone, but also to Oedipus, who was similarly abandoned by his father and left to die in the wild, but saved by a shepherd.
WHAT DOES RECONCILIATION REQUIRE?
Sarah Beckwith's book, Shakespeare and the Grammar of Forgiveness, is especially illuminating regarding reconciliations and changes in the English understanding of the sacrament of penance, confession, or reconciliation. She focuses in part on The Winter’s Tale and claims that the play may be Shakespeare's way of wrestling with changes in England's way of understanding and imagining how reconciliation and forgiveness work.
Under Catholicism, people went to a priest as a mediator when they sought God's forgiveness for sins against God or moral offenses against others. Yet the Protestant reformation questioned this process: If God is supposedly all-powerful, why must people use priests as intermediaries, when in fact priests sometimes seemed corrupt in seeking a kickback or financial reward by selling indulgences, to make families feel their loved ones' time in purgatory was shortened? Didn't this all-powerful God have the power to forgive sins directly, without the intermediary of a priest?
On the other hand, wasn't it also true that the counsel of priests was helpful to those seeking forgiveness and reconciliation? Just as it was possible that people could be insincere in seeking forgiveness of God through the intermediary of a Catholic priest, wasn't it obvious that insincere people could claim publicly or privately that they wanted forgiveness, and believed God forgave them, when they had little intention of reforming the habits that made them offend others?
Both Hamlet and The Winter's Tale offer examples of kings either failing, or succeeding, in repenting and seeking forgiveness:
In Hamlet, Claudius prays and wishes to be forgiven so as to avoid damnation, but he is absolutely unwilling to confess to the public his sin of murdering his brother, the king, or to give up what he gained by it: The throne, and his brother's wife. He knows that giving up these would be part of the price of his forgiveness, so without them, he knows he is not forgiven. This is a vivid example, not only for the average person of what true reconciliation and forgiveness require, but also of what might be required of some kings, who (the play seems to imply) are otherwise damned.
In The Winter's Tale, the king resists repentance until after his son dies and his wife is believed dead. Both plays assert: Perhaps especially when monarchs refuse to repent of their sins, lives are sometimes lost because of it. When Leontes finally repents, it is too late to save his son, and apparently too late to save his wife.
PRIEST-MEDIATED, vs. PUBLIC, vs. SECRET/SILENT CONFESSION:
In Hamlet, the prince makes a public confession that he has "wronged" Laertes; in The Winter's Tale, king Leontes makes a pubic confession of the mistakes he made that resulted in the death and the apparent death of his wife. Public confession was accepted and encouraged in some Protestant contexts, but it still involved auricular confession, or the speaking or public admission of sin, not merely confessing sins in the quiet of one's heart, so in that sense, Shakespeare seems to prefer an admission of fault that is public and open between people, and not in secret. But inasmuch as Catholic confession was between the sinner and the priest, but Protestant confession was sometimes before the church community, confession of wrongs in both plays also resembles aspects of Protestant practices.
POLITICAL IMPLICATIONS
In Shakespeare's lifetime, it's certainly possible that Elizabeth I, and James I and VI, made mistakes that cost people their lives, and that people had strong opinions about this that were difficult or impossible to voice too directly.
Leontes feels such regret that he visits the monuments to his son and wife daily for 16 years, feeling sorrow and repenting in his heart of his mistakes. This seems extreme. What was the point of such hyperbole?
Today, we might expect a good plot to have allowed the king perhaps to seek a worthy heir and to abdicate his throne in favor of a life that might help and save lives, working on behalf of the poor and of women who were victims of violent, jealous husbands. Might it not have been better for him to try to do more good in the world, to tip the scales in his favor, and to outweigh the damage he had caused?
Or was there perhaps some other reason for the apparent hyperbole regarding a king whose repentance seems too self-obsessed with navel-gazing about his personal feelings of loss, and the continued waste of his talents?
Was Elizabeth's dramatic regret over the execution of Essex perceived as too dramatic, too much navel-gazing, keeping her from her duties and advancing the public good (as some may have perceived Leontes' repentance)?
Did Some in Shakespeare's time wish that their own monarchs would do a penance of regret and prayer for 16 years, for every two deaths they had caused, especially if those deaths involved family members, friends and neighbors?
Even in Hamlet, scholars note how remarkable it is for Claudius to have absolute moral and spiritual clarity about the severity of his sins, and also of the consequences of his inability to give up what he gained by them.
Is this a kind of hyperbole too, an exaggeration as a kind of wishful thinking that their own apparently unrepentant monarchs might so clearly be damned, and know it?
MERELY UNIVERSAL, or ACHIEVING UNIVERSALITY by FAITHFULNESS to THE LOCAL & POLITICAL?
While it’s true that people of many stations in life and of many ages have been able to, and will long continue to, relate to both plays, it would be wrong to say the plays are merely about universal emotions and traits such as ambition, jealousy, stubbornness, justice, love, and reconciliation. It is that, but also more. (The term, "universal," is somewhat outdated for a variety of reasons, but many still resort to it when describing Shakespeare's appeal and assumed artistic goals).
In fact, the plays may also give us a glimpse of some of the obsessions of Early Modern English audiences: Problems of corruption in high places, especially with monarchs, and the hope that, if need be, their monarchs might be capable of changes of heart and mind for the better.
Some would like to believe that Shakespeare was somehow angelic and above the local and political concerns of his time, and only wrote about universal concerns. But perhaps Shakespeare achieved universal appeal in his plays precisely because he payed such good attention to the local and political concerns of his time, reflecting on them richly. And certainly a part of this involved his attention to the importance of the quality of a monarch's leadership and example.
In Hamlet, Guildenstern and Rosencrantz observe:
The oracle from Apollo’s priest in The Winter’s Tale says that Leontes is a jealous tyrant in his actions toward his wife and daughter; the actions of a tyrant have far-reaching effects.
Hamlet ask whether it would be wrong to allow the murderous liar-king, Claudius, cause more evil:
Do we feel this less today? Does the corruption or indifference of a Donald Trump or a Boris Johnson inspire less widespread moral outrage, when so many seem to celebrate in these leaders what others see as vices and character flaws?
Or does it depend on each observing member of the audience of the world as a "stage"? If we are jealous, paranoid, adulterous, indifferent, and murderous, would we celebrate a leader who displays our own flaws, vices and pathologies, in any age?
What do you think?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Shakespeare's Globe Theater in London has been offering free viewing of certain productions during the COVID-19 pandemic crisis, while many are staying home and social distancing. Each play has been made available on Youtube for two weeks.
Starting a week ago yesterday, Monday, 18 May through Sunday 31 May, the new play that can be viewed for free from this link is Shakespeare's A Winter's Tale. You can also view it directly on YouTube here during this same time period:
To donate to Shakespeare's Globe, click here.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Quotes from Hamlet are taken from InternetShakespeare, Modern, Editor's Version, edited by David Bevington, and courtesy of the University of Victoria in Canada.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Disclaimer: By noting bible passages in this blog, I do not intend to promote any religion over any other, nor am I attempting to promote religious belief in general; only to point out how the Bible may have influenced Shakespeare, his plays, and his age.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Thanks for reading!
My current project is a book tentatively titled Hamlet’s Bible, about biblical allusions and plot echoes in Hamlet.
Below is a link to a list of some of my top posts (“greatest hits”), including a description of my book project (last item on the list):
https://pauladrianfried.blogspot.com/2019/12/top-20-hamlet-bible-posts.html
I post every week, so please visit as often as you like and consider subscribing.
[Image via Shakespeare's Globe]
Consider:
Both Hamlet and The Winter’s Tale are about what is appropriate mourning for the dead:
- In Hamlet, the mourning by Gertrude of her husband's death, and by Claudius, of his brother's death, are too short in Hamlet's opinion.
- In The Winter’s Tale, in spite of the real need for Leontes to demonstrate a very real repentance for his grave mistakes, the mourning may seem too long.
- Hamlet involves suspected adultery, poisoning, conspiracy to poison, and revenge.
- The Winter’s Tale involves suspected adultery and conspiracy to poison as revenge.
- Hamlet has a character (Claudius) who speaks of being pulled in two directions by both happiness (regarding his marriage) and sorrow at his brother's death.
- The Winter’s Tale has a character (Paulina) who speaks of being pulled in two directions by both happiness (regarding the return and marriage of the princess) and sorrow at news of her husband's death.
- Hamlet includes a sea-voyage by the prince and his unexpected early return that helps bring the action of the play to a resolution that includes key reconciliations.
- The Winter’s Tale includes a sea-voyage by a princess and later, her unexpected return, which helps bring the action of the play to a resolution that includes key reconciliations.
- Hamlet is about a king who is killed by his brother, a brother who may have had an affair with the king’s wife before the king’s death, followed by a biblically incestuous marriage.
- The Winter’s Tale is about a king who is paranoid about the possibility that a friend, who was like a brother to him,* is having an affair with his wife and plotting to kill him. [* The word "brother" is used most often in the play between Leontes, King of Sicily, and his friend Polixenes, King of Bohemia. The "blood" of an apparent brother, being too friendly with Leontes' wife, feels nearly incestuous to the paranoid Leontes.]
- Hamlet includes a graveyard scene that echoes many aspects of the gospel tale about the disciples on the road to Emmaus, implying a kind of resurrection appearance of Yorick embodied in the gravedigger and in Yoricks skull.
- The Winter’s Tale, like Much Ado About Nothing, includes what seems to be a faked death and resurrection, as while Hermione may have been believed by all to have died, it seems that Paulina may have discovered that she was alive and kept her in a secret place for 16 years, if in fact Paulina didn't perhaps give to Hermione a potion like the priest gives to Juliet to make her appear to be dead. (Perhaps the details matter less than the faked death-and-resurrection? Does this imply that Shakespeare questioned the literal-historical nature of the resurrection, and believed it was, in part, redemptive fiction and theatrics?)
- Hamlet is a play in which the eventual repentance of the queen and prince may help inspire the a change of heart and confession of Laertes in the last act and exposure of the poison plot.
(See also here regarding Gertrude's influence and contingency with Hamlet, Laertes, and others.)
- The Winter’s Tale is a play in which the eventual long repentance of King Leontes may help to inspire a change of heart in his friend Polixenes, King of Bohemia, regarding the marriage of his son.
- Hamlet is in part about a prince of Denmark who makes oaths of love to a woman not of royal birth, and whose family tell her that she is unworthy of the match; later, in her apparent madness, she says “It is the false steward that stole his master's daughter” (4.5.2925), implying that perhaps she is worthy, at least figuratively a changeling, and her father had been a false steward.
- The Winter’s Tale is about a prince of Bohemia who declares his love for an apparent shepherd’s daughter; his father opposes the match, believing she is unworthy, but will later discover that she had been a changeling, the daughter of a king, a princess stolen away shortly after birth to save her life.
- Hamlet is about an ambitious, stubborn, murderous usurper-king who tries but fails to repent, causes the death of his own heir, and who later fails to save the life of his queen, and a prince who repents of his madness and violence only after his sea-voyage and brush with death.
- The Winter’s Tale is about a hard-hearted, stubborn and jealous king, who repents only after the death of his son and heir, and whose selfishness leads to the apparent death of his queen.
Can you think of other common themes and concerns between these two plays?
NODS TO THE OEDIPUS CYCLE
It is well known today that Freud saw in Hamlet an example of his Oedipal complex. But the Winter's Tale also gives a nod to the Oedipus cycle of Sophocles, by way of a character named Antigonus, a male version of Antigone, a daughter of Oedipus who is left for dead as punishment for seeking to bury one of her brothers (topic of last week's blog post here). Instead of seeking to bury the body of an already dead brother and prince, Antigonus swears that he will bear the infant princess Perdita far away to be abandoned to the elements, since her father believes she was conceived by another man. The princess is later found and saved by a shepherd. This connects the play not only to Antigone, but also to Oedipus, who was similarly abandoned by his father and left to die in the wild, but saved by a shepherd.
WHAT DOES RECONCILIATION REQUIRE?
Sarah Beckwith's book, Shakespeare and the Grammar of Forgiveness, is especially illuminating regarding reconciliations and changes in the English understanding of the sacrament of penance, confession, or reconciliation. She focuses in part on The Winter’s Tale and claims that the play may be Shakespeare's way of wrestling with changes in England's way of understanding and imagining how reconciliation and forgiveness work.
Under Catholicism, people went to a priest as a mediator when they sought God's forgiveness for sins against God or moral offenses against others. Yet the Protestant reformation questioned this process: If God is supposedly all-powerful, why must people use priests as intermediaries, when in fact priests sometimes seemed corrupt in seeking a kickback or financial reward by selling indulgences, to make families feel their loved ones' time in purgatory was shortened? Didn't this all-powerful God have the power to forgive sins directly, without the intermediary of a priest?
On the other hand, wasn't it also true that the counsel of priests was helpful to those seeking forgiveness and reconciliation? Just as it was possible that people could be insincere in seeking forgiveness of God through the intermediary of a Catholic priest, wasn't it obvious that insincere people could claim publicly or privately that they wanted forgiveness, and believed God forgave them, when they had little intention of reforming the habits that made them offend others?
Both Hamlet and The Winter's Tale offer examples of kings either failing, or succeeding, in repenting and seeking forgiveness:
In Hamlet, Claudius prays and wishes to be forgiven so as to avoid damnation, but he is absolutely unwilling to confess to the public his sin of murdering his brother, the king, or to give up what he gained by it: The throne, and his brother's wife. He knows that giving up these would be part of the price of his forgiveness, so without them, he knows he is not forgiven. This is a vivid example, not only for the average person of what true reconciliation and forgiveness require, but also of what might be required of some kings, who (the play seems to imply) are otherwise damned.
In The Winter's Tale, the king resists repentance until after his son dies and his wife is believed dead. Both plays assert: Perhaps especially when monarchs refuse to repent of their sins, lives are sometimes lost because of it. When Leontes finally repents, it is too late to save his son, and apparently too late to save his wife.
PRIEST-MEDIATED, vs. PUBLIC, vs. SECRET/SILENT CONFESSION:
In Hamlet, the prince makes a public confession that he has "wronged" Laertes; in The Winter's Tale, king Leontes makes a pubic confession of the mistakes he made that resulted in the death and the apparent death of his wife. Public confession was accepted and encouraged in some Protestant contexts, but it still involved auricular confession, or the speaking or public admission of sin, not merely confessing sins in the quiet of one's heart, so in that sense, Shakespeare seems to prefer an admission of fault that is public and open between people, and not in secret. But inasmuch as Catholic confession was between the sinner and the priest, but Protestant confession was sometimes before the church community, confession of wrongs in both plays also resembles aspects of Protestant practices.
POLITICAL IMPLICATIONS
In Shakespeare's lifetime, it's certainly possible that Elizabeth I, and James I and VI, made mistakes that cost people their lives, and that people had strong opinions about this that were difficult or impossible to voice too directly.
Leontes feels such regret that he visits the monuments to his son and wife daily for 16 years, feeling sorrow and repenting in his heart of his mistakes. This seems extreme. What was the point of such hyperbole?
Today, we might expect a good plot to have allowed the king perhaps to seek a worthy heir and to abdicate his throne in favor of a life that might help and save lives, working on behalf of the poor and of women who were victims of violent, jealous husbands. Might it not have been better for him to try to do more good in the world, to tip the scales in his favor, and to outweigh the damage he had caused?
Or was there perhaps some other reason for the apparent hyperbole regarding a king whose repentance seems too self-obsessed with navel-gazing about his personal feelings of loss, and the continued waste of his talents?
Was Elizabeth's dramatic regret over the execution of Essex perceived as too dramatic, too much navel-gazing, keeping her from her duties and advancing the public good (as some may have perceived Leontes' repentance)?
Did Some in Shakespeare's time wish that their own monarchs would do a penance of regret and prayer for 16 years, for every two deaths they had caused, especially if those deaths involved family members, friends and neighbors?
Even in Hamlet, scholars note how remarkable it is for Claudius to have absolute moral and spiritual clarity about the severity of his sins, and also of the consequences of his inability to give up what he gained by them.
Is this a kind of hyperbole too, an exaggeration as a kind of wishful thinking that their own apparently unrepentant monarchs might so clearly be damned, and know it?
MERELY UNIVERSAL, or ACHIEVING UNIVERSALITY by FAITHFULNESS to THE LOCAL & POLITICAL?
While it’s true that people of many stations in life and of many ages have been able to, and will long continue to, relate to both plays, it would be wrong to say the plays are merely about universal emotions and traits such as ambition, jealousy, stubbornness, justice, love, and reconciliation. It is that, but also more. (The term, "universal," is somewhat outdated for a variety of reasons, but many still resort to it when describing Shakespeare's appeal and assumed artistic goals).
In fact, the plays may also give us a glimpse of some of the obsessions of Early Modern English audiences: Problems of corruption in high places, especially with monarchs, and the hope that, if need be, their monarchs might be capable of changes of heart and mind for the better.
Some would like to believe that Shakespeare was somehow angelic and above the local and political concerns of his time, and only wrote about universal concerns. But perhaps Shakespeare achieved universal appeal in his plays precisely because he payed such good attention to the local and political concerns of his time, reflecting on them richly. And certainly a part of this involved his attention to the importance of the quality of a monarch's leadership and example.
In Hamlet, Guildenstern and Rosencrantz observe:
GUILDENSTERNWe are bound up in one another’s destinies, but this is even more the case with monarchs, and certainly the case with Henry VIII’s divorce from his first wife to marry Anne Boleyn: Henry’s break from Rome resulted in a great deal of bloodshed, as the king’s actions were not isolated, but had far-reaching consequences, like the spokes of a wheel. The effects of Henry’s choices were still playing out in Shakespeare’s lifetime and causing more deaths.
Most holy and religious fear it is
To keep those many many bodies safe
That live and feed upon your majesty.
ROSENCRANTZ
The single and peculiar life is bound
With all the strength and armor of the mind
To keep itself from noyance, but much more
That spirit upon whose weal depends and rests
The lives of many. The cease of majesty
Dies not alone, but like a gulf doth draw
What's near it with it. It is a massy wheel
Fixed on the summit of the highest mount,
To whose huge spokes ten thousand lesser things
Are mortised and adjoined, which, when it falls,
Each small annexment, petty consequence,
Attends the boist'rous ruin. Never alone
Did the king sigh, but with a general groan. (3.3.2280-96)
The oracle from Apollo’s priest in The Winter’s Tale says that Leontes is a jealous tyrant in his actions toward his wife and daughter; the actions of a tyrant have far-reaching effects.
Hamlet ask whether it would be wrong to allow the murderous liar-king, Claudius, cause more evil:
And is't not to be damnedAnd yet, as Guildenstern implies (quoted above), kings were thought to be representatives of God on earth, and therefore better if they exemplified the best of Christian virtues rather than the worst sins and failings of Christianity and its previous leaders:
To let this canker of our nature come
In further evil?” (5.2.3572-4)
Most holy and religious fear it isMonarchs were believed by many to be like sacraments of the divine, so for monarchs to act in corrupt ways implied that something was wrong, not only on earth, but perhaps in the heavenly realm as well.
To keep those many many bodies safe
That live and feed upon your majesty.
Do we feel this less today? Does the corruption or indifference of a Donald Trump or a Boris Johnson inspire less widespread moral outrage, when so many seem to celebrate in these leaders what others see as vices and character flaws?
Or does it depend on each observing member of the audience of the world as a "stage"? If we are jealous, paranoid, adulterous, indifferent, and murderous, would we celebrate a leader who displays our own flaws, vices and pathologies, in any age?
What do you think?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Shakespeare's Globe Theater in London has been offering free viewing of certain productions during the COVID-19 pandemic crisis, while many are staying home and social distancing. Each play has been made available on Youtube for two weeks.
Starting a week ago yesterday, Monday, 18 May through Sunday 31 May, the new play that can be viewed for free from this link is Shakespeare's A Winter's Tale. You can also view it directly on YouTube here during this same time period:
To donate to Shakespeare's Globe, click here.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Quotes from Hamlet are taken from InternetShakespeare, Modern, Editor's Version, edited by David Bevington, and courtesy of the University of Victoria in Canada.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Disclaimer: By noting bible passages in this blog, I do not intend to promote any religion over any other, nor am I attempting to promote religious belief in general; only to point out how the Bible may have influenced Shakespeare, his plays, and his age.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Thanks for reading!
My current project is a book tentatively titled Hamlet’s Bible, about biblical allusions and plot echoes in Hamlet.
Below is a link to a list of some of my top posts (“greatest hits”), including a description of my book project (last item on the list):
https://pauladrianfried.blogspot.com/2019/12/top-20-hamlet-bible-posts.html
I post every week, so please visit as often as you like and consider subscribing.
Excellent analysis, Dr. Paul.
ReplyDeleteThanks, Michael!
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