Paul Adrian Fried / HAMLET'S BIBLE

 “Shakespeare is not treating us to an imaginative presentation of theology. He is testing theology with his imagination and using theology for his artistic purpose.” (105) - Robert G. Hunter “Shakespeare and the Mystery of God’s Judgments” (1976) ~~~~~ This is one of my favorite quotes from this book, and sums up an important perspective. It contrasts with the assumption by some scholars such as Charles Wordsworth (1864) - a position strongly disliked by many others - that Shakespeare used biblical references and religious themes to demonstrate and evangelize for the Christian faith. Other scholars such as Maurice Hunt (Shakespeare's Religious Allusiveness: Its Play and Tolerance) sometimes assume biblical references might be sorted into binary opposition between apparent Protestant and Catholic references, perhaps proving Shakespeare was one or the other, or that he at least conformed to the Protestant inclinations of his time. But "testing theology with his imagination...

Unlike Claudius, who ignored qualms of conscience to murder his brother and usurp the throne, Ophelia’s relationship to her conscience is more healthy, rich, and self-directed.   Claudius just doesn’t get it, so he needs Hamlet to catch his conscience in The Mousetrap, [1] which reenacts Claudius poisoning his brother and wooing his victim’s wife. Hamlet says playing holds a mirror up to the age [2], and he uses the playlet to hold a mirror up to Gertrude and Claudius, showing what they’ve done. But Ophelia gets it, and doesn’t need someone to hold up a mirror for her conscience. She chooses her own songs, stories, and allusions to reflect upon her sadness and conscience. [3] She knows her father died, but doesn’t know that Hamlet killed him thinking it was Claudius. She sings songs of mourning for perhaps her father and/or the dead king [4], songs of her own choosing. Ophelia knows Hamlet made to her “almost all the holy vows of heaven” [5] perhaps the equivalent of a handfast w...

Instead of reading Ophelia’s love for Hamlet as unwise, too “free” [1], and viewing Gertrude as adulterous [2], it is possible to read both characters very differently. We might be nudged in this direction by certain feminist readings, one being a book by Cristina León Alfar called Women and Shakespeare's Cuckoldry Plays: Shifting Narratives of Marital Betrayal [3]. Although the focus of her book is not Hamlet, many of her insights apply. Alfar’s focus involves six plays in which male claims of female adultery play a central role. These include Merry Wives of Windsor, Much Ado About Nothing, Othello, and The Winter’s Tale. Alfar carefully tracks a trend: Men (at times misled by men like Iago and Don John) make false claims of women’s infidelity, claiming wives or fiances have made them “cuckolds.” But these claims are fictions or lies based on male anxiety. Women, often with help of female allies, can shift these narratives, accusing the men of slander for their false claims. In ...

Here are a few key religious and biblical allusions in Hamlet 1.2 (not an exhaustive list): ~~~~~ CLAUDIUS: ...our sometime sister, now our queen,/ [...] Taken to wife. (1.2.8-14) For Shakespeare’s English audience, this would have struck a nerve: Henry VIII had married his dead brother’s widow, Katherine of Aragon, but later (after no living sons and an affair with Anne Boleyn) claimed it was a biblically forbidden marriage.  [For more on the biblical passages related to "incestuous marriage" see this link: https://pauladrianfried.blogspot.com/2022/06/the-bible-henry-viii-claudius-and.html ] Therefore he claimed he needed an annulment, which triggered the English Reformation and many executions of Protestants as heretics (by Mary I) and of Catholics as treasonous (by Henry, Edward, Elizabeth). So audiences would have viewed Claudius as being like a Henry VIII who had not repented of his incestuous marriage. ~~~~~ CLAUDIUS: Young Fortinbras, Holding a weak supposal of our...

Ophelia is too often portrayed as limp, soft, and either blank-eyed in her apparent innocence, or wide-eyed in her madness, as shown in these paintings by William Gorman Wills (c.1880) and Benjamin West (detail, 1792). This is based more on artistic and dramatic assumptions than on the text of the play. When we first see her brother Laertes in 1.2, he is reluctant to speak in an audience with the king who asks him repeatedly about his requested permission to return to France and scolds him for his shyness:   CLAUDIUS: What is ’t, Laertes? You cannot speak of reason to the Dane And lose your voice. What wouldst thou beg, Laertes, That shall not be my offer, not thy asking? [...] What wouldst thou have, Laertes? (1.2.43-51) Claudius is a bully, and also bullies Hamlet later in the same scene about his mourning of his father. (1.2.96-109) But Ophelia in her “mad” scene shows no shyness, and asks the first question: OPHELIA: Where is the beauteous Majesty of Denmark? (4.5.26) And if Ha...

Shakespeare occasionally reminds us of the Elizabethan slang, that men have a “thing” and women a “nothing.” Ophelia’s name begins with an “O,” an emptiness at least potentially waiting to be filled. Questions are analogous to this. Nature abhors a vacuum; many questions seek answers, or are at least open to mysteries, first attempts to name their boundaries. Hamlet is famous for asking, To be or not? But he also resists certain questions, telling Rosencrantz and Guildenstern not to assume they can pluck the heart of his mystery. Bridget Gellert Lyons (1977) and Katharine Goodland (2006) are among those who notice in Ophelia early in the nunnery scene an echo of the ubiquitous images of Mary reading a book, perhaps of psalms, when visited by the angel at the Annunciation. In Luke’s gospel, Mary’s first sentence to the angel is a question: ““How shall this be?” But Mary is open to the angel’s mystery: “be it unto me according to thy word,” she says, or as Hamlet would put it, “Let be.”...

In the first act of Hamlet, the first five uses of the word "strange" all refer to the poisoned king. HORATIO: 'Tis *strange.* (1.1.75) HORATIO: ...This bodes some *strange* eruption to our state. (1.1.80) HAMLET: 'Tis very *strange.* (1.2.233) GHOST: Murther most foul, as in the best it is; But this most foul, *strange,* and unnatural. (1.5.34) HORATIO: O day and night, but this is wondrous *strange*! (1.5.185) HAMLET: And therefore as a *stranger* give it welcome. (1.5.186) Shortly after that, some of the next occurrences of the word "strange" refer to the way Hamlet may act while feigning madness. Having spoken to the ghost and learned of the poisoning, Hamlet warns Horatio and the sentinels that he may act *strange* (1.5.190), but that they are to keep his secret (1.5.201-202). IT SO HAPPENS that until the death in 1594 of Lord Strange, Ferdinando Stanley, more than half of the actors in Shakespeare's playing company were "Strangers," or ...

Many viewers and readers of Shakespeare's Hamlet (including me) approach the play from a secular point of view. Yet historians and Shakespeare scholars know that the play was written at a time when there were many religious controversies: Shakespeare's older sister had been baptized Catholic under "Bloody" Mary I, when Protestants had been burned at the stake as heretics. Shakespeare had been baptized under Protestant Elizabeth I, during whose reign many Catholics were executed as traitors, hung until nearly dead and disemboweled so they could see their organs ("drawn and quartered"). Catholics believed in transubstantiation, that the host was actually the body of Christ, but English Protestants took that language less literally. Catholics believed in purgatory, that imperfect but mostly good souls might be purified before entry into heaven, while Protestants believed that at the moment of death, one's fate was sealed, bound for heaven or hell at th...

Shakespeare’s Hamlet is a play that is in part about how we relate to the dead: What, if anything, do we owe the dead? What can we do for them, or they for us? The play bears the scars of the Reformation. The ghost seems to be Catholic, but his son was sent to study at Wittenberg, made famous in part by Martin Luther. Long before Calvin and Luther, the Catholic Church had made efforts at reform in fits and starts, some successful, many not. Many Catholic theologians and historians believe that reformation thinkers like Martin Luther were correct in their perception of abuses in need of reform, and of stubborn resistance. Protestantism cut off many of the faithful from the idea that they could ask saints to intercede for them, to pray with them, to advocate for them. The first of the Ten Commandments said that there was only one God, and that believers were to worship that God alone. And yet the creed also taught that there was a resurrection, and that living Christians were united in...