Hamlet, Christmas, and the Liturgical Year

Cassidy Cash has an episode, "Is Hamlet a Christmas Play?"

This older podcast/episode from 2019 is still available on YouTube:

In it, she discusses Steve Roth's essay,
"Hamlet as The Christmas Prince: Certain Speculations on Hamlet, the Calendar, Revels, and Misrule."
It's an interesting topic and podcast episode.

Roth's essay appeared in Early Modern Literary Studies 7.3 (January, 2002): 5.1-89

Roth is also the author of the book,
Hamlet: The Undiscovered Country. In it, he argues that Hamlet is about 16 years old. See also Rhodri Lewis, Hamlet and the Vision of Darkness, and his article in Shakespeare Magazine UK from August of 2018, issue 14: "How old is Hamlet?"). One need not agree with them on this point, especially if one is Ian McKellen....

While the play may have been written for, opened, and played during Advent and the 12 Days of Christmas, the play contains references to scripture readings that were read in church at other times of the year as well (with some liturgical feasts cited by Roth).

An interesting doctoral thesis for some rising scholar might be to map out where all the biblical references in the play fall in the liturgical calendar as scheduled in the Book of Common Prayer (BCP). One might start with Naseeb Shaheen's Bible References in Shakespeare's Plays (available in college libraries); then look for less explicit bible passages that Shaheen doesn't include. Some references in the play are omitted from the BCP schedule; why? Map out the readings via the liturgical year and BCP, and it might yield some interesting insights.

OTHER BOOKS about Shakespeare, Early Modern plays, and the English church's liturgical year in Shakespeare's time:

Renaissance Drama and the English Church Year (R. Chris Hassel, Jr., 1979) *

Liturgy and Literature in the Making of Protestant England (Timothy Rosendale, 2007) **

Shakespeare's Common Prayer (Daniel Swift, 2013);

Happy New Year, and for those of you still celebrating Christmas and its full season (which for some lasts at least through Feast of the Epiphany, which this year falls on Thursday, January 6), merry Christmas.

* Published by University of Nebraska press. Perhaps out of print (?) but available used; I picked one up that happened to be a former library book at Wittenberg University in Ohio! That sounds familiar...

** I was able to meet Timothy Rosendale at a conference of the Shakespeare Association of America, held in Los Angeles in 2018, in a seminar session on Shakespeare and religion chaired by Jay Zysk, author of Shadow and Substance: Eucharistic Controversy and English Drama Across the Reformation Divide. Also at that session was Gayle Gaskill, editor of the New Kittredge edition of Twelfth Night and an emeritus professor at the University of St. Catherine in St. Paul (where I grew up). Gayle presented a paper on Twelfth Night and the Book of Common Prayer that I would include in this list of recommended readings, but I'm not sure if it's published yet; something to watch for.
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Thanks for reading!

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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.