Paul Adrian Fried / HAMLET'S BIBLE

Before completing my series on Ophelia, some elements about Gertrude require scrutiny. The controversy and mystery of Ophleia overlaps with Gertrude in a variety of ways: - Gertrude learns of her son’s love letters to Ophelia, encourages Ophelia’s love to heal her son’s madness, reports Ophelia’s death by drowning, and says at Ophelia’s grave that she wished Ophelia had been her son’s bride. Characters are said to be static (unchanging) or dynamic (changing) in light of developments in the plot and interactions with other characters. Without having to speculate at all whether she has any sort of Christian afterlife in heaven, hell, or purgatory, we might say that Ophelia has something of an afterlife through her example to, and influence on, the Queen. But this requires a clear understanding of a series of events and the evidence in the texts. In upcoming posts, I will explore some of these and other overlaps between Ophelia and Gertrude; the “envious sliver” of the willow that break...

HAMLET  A man may fish with the worm that hath eat  of a king and eat of the fish that hath fed of that worm. KING  What dost thou mean by this? HAMLET  Nothing but to show you how a king may go a progress through the guts of a beggar. (4.3.30-35) (Some say this sounds like a threat, from Hamlet to Claudius; but it's also more simply a reminder to Claudius of his mortality....) In Shakespeare’s time, Protestants and Catholics still debated Eucharist. - Catholics are taught that in the prayers of the Mass, the Eucharistic bread becomes the “body of Christ,” but that this is not cannibalism. - Lutherans are taught that the bread becomes Christ but also remains bread, a position too Catholic for Calvin. - Calvinists believe those who eat of the Eucharistic received Christ spiritually, not physically. - Protestant polemics made fun of this, observing that if a church mouse ate crumbs of Catholic Eucharist, it would be ridiculous to claim that Christ, King of heaven, “m...

Shakespeare’s Hamlet begins with Horatio acting like a doubting Thomas [1], not believing in ghosts, converted to belief after witnessing a ghost first-hand. But unmentioned is the lesson Jesus gives in John’s gospel after Thomas comes to belief: “...blessed are they that have not seen, and have believed.” [Jn 20:29] Are we invited to wait for this other shoe to drop? Shakespeare constructed his play so that Ophelia’s death, and Gertrude’s account of it, requires of all a leap of faith: Not seeing, but believing. Gertrude describes it not as a death in despair, but in charity (generously bestowing crowns) [2] and in faith (chanting sacred hymns) [3] after falling in the brook by accident, not intent.[4] In Gertrude’s account, Ophelia floats toward her death without struggle, as if to accept the risk of her own death in faith, like Hamlet: “Let be.”[5] We have not seen her death, yet we are invited to believe. The play invites cognitive dissonance between the expected damnation of sui...

2023 was a good year for the “Hamlet’s Bible” blog, and I’m most grateful to my readers who follow my posts, either through the blog itself, or through other social media. - The blog received 21.3k new views in 2023 out of a total of 56k views since January of 2019. - These figures do not include views between June 2017-December 2018 when I was initially posting every week on LinkedIn (before the switch to the blogger platform). In early January, I posted about "13 Handles on Hamlet 's Mousetrap," a post that had many views: https://pauladrianfried.blogspot.com/2023/01/13-handles-on-hamlets-mousetrap.html In 2023, I did two longer series of posts: - In late January, 2023, I began a 12-part series of posts about Hamlet in 3.2 after The Mousetrap, ironically comparing himself to the boy Jesus, lost and found in the temple, amusing and astonishing the temple elders and his parents. This biblical allusion had not been identified by the major scholars...

I am reposting some thoughts from Charlotte Scott, who extends some ideas of Julia Kristeva regarding the “ick” and the “abject”: [1] Charlotte writes, “Whilst the abject may be those things, fluids, forms, faeces that we ‘thrust aside in order to live’, (Kristeva) the ick is what we reject in order not to become.” Often we may fail to attend closely to the elements she identifies in Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing and Twelfth Night: We feel a cathartic effect as we view or read the plays, but at times we may become too familiar with them, or with scholarly theories that address them. But when people like Charlotte Scott draw attention to them like this, following a kind of golden thread (Blake) [2], we become defamiliarized (Viktor Shklovsky) enough to give it fresh attention. In Hamlet, Claudius, as murderer of his brother and usurper of the throne, would greatly prefer that Hamlet “thrust aside” his mourning “in order to live,” and Gertrude joins him in discouraging Hamlet’s m...