Paul Adrian Fried / HAMLET'S BIBLE

Last week [1] I shared my belated realization that, after seeing Hamlet’s playlet that he calls “The Mousetrap” [2], Ophelia refers to a folktale in which a baker’s daughter is turned into an owl [3], and that an owl is a “living mousetrap.” For now, I’d like to call mousetraps masculine and externalizing, and owls, female and internalizing. In Shakespeare’s Elizabethan slang, a man had a “thing” between his legs, an external organ; a woman had a “nothing,” an “O,” which could potentially receive a man’s “thing” and which led to her womb, another “O” of potential.[4] Hamlet’s mousetrap analogy for a play to catch the king’s conscience [5] is an external thing, as the script and players (like moving parts of a mousetrap) are external to his body. One sets a mousetrap and waits.[6] In contrast, the owl, a living mousetrap, consumes mice, takes them inside itself, later regurgitating bones and hair. Mousetraps are externalizing and male, like rapiers that Hamlet and Laertes use

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OPHELIA: “They say the owl was a baker’s daughter.” What are owls famous for eating — even a dozen in a single night? Mice. What does Hamlet call the play by which he hopes to catch the conscience of the king? “The Mousetrap” [1]. Ophelia sat with Hamlet at his playlet, heard him call it “The Mousetrap.” She soon references a folktale in which a baker’s daughter is ungenerous with a beggar at the door (Jesus or a fairy in disguise), and as punishment, is changed into an owl [2]. Into a living mousetrap. (And the owl asks, “Who? Who?” First words of the play: “Who’s there?”) The name “Gertrude” may point to a Christian saint famous for getting rid of mice [3]. I have argued that, by drinking the poison cup, Gertrude builds a better mousetrap, catching the conscience of Claudius [4]. So there is a trilogy of mouse-trapping characters in the play: Hamlet, Ophelia, and Gertrude. But Ophelia’s owl reference is usually not viewed by scholars, critics, teachers and students as a reference t

QUEEN: [...] for your part, Ophelia, I do wish That your good beauties be the happy cause Of Hamlet’s wildness. So shall I hope your virtues Will bring him to his wonted way again, To both your honors. OPHELIA  Madam, I wish it may.  (3.1.42-47)   Queen Gertrude expresses hope that Ophelia’s father Polonius may be correct in thinking that Hamlet is mad for the loss of Ophelia’s love. Shakespeare often described love as a madness in need of a cure.[1] This may be more significant than one might assume at first glance, for at least three reasons.   First, Gertrude’s comments apply not only to her son but also to her new husband, even if she doesn’t know it. For Claudius to kill his brother and take the throne and his brother’s wife seems a kind of madness. Gertrude’s “virtues” were not enough to cure him. Secondly, “The face that launched a thousand ships” is the famous Christopher Marlowe line describing the beauty of Helen of Troy. To steal her, Paris risked war, which seems madness

Consider how the impulse behind male resistance to women’s suffrage may have also manifested itself in male scholarly bias about Ophelia and Gertrude. If one feels women are too emotional, not rational enough to deserve to vote, how might that color one’s reading of Ophelia’s madness and drowning, and of Gertrude’s decision to drink from what Claudius knows is a poison cup, intended for Hamlet?  Women were not admitted to study at Oxford until 1920, and did not get the vote in England until 1918. (In other words, women have only had the vote in the UK for 100 years, out of four centuries of Shakespeare; and the vote is only one of many possible indicators of male bias.) It is easy to imagine average male literary critics writing off Ophelia’s many lines in Act 4, scene 5, as simply mad ravings, rather than finding any method in her madness; easy to imagine them missing how she acts like a court fool [1], or like Hamlet’s promised, handfast wife and queen regent in his absence [2]; ea

Shakespeare’s Hamlet is radical in a religious sense. Shakespeare hints that Ophelia, Gertrude, and Hamlet—apparently damned for different reasons—are not only saved, but in fact are Christ-figures [1]. The texts support such a reading. Yet even if Shakespeare uses religion mostly for dramatic (not religious)  purposes [2], it is safe to say that a majority of scholars today might reject this idea, or at least be quite disinterested in it. Ophelia is apparently damned as a suicide [3], but Gertrude blames her death in part on an “envious sliver” of willow [4], envious — like Claudius — that it didn’t get a crown. Ophelia was generous in bestowing crowns (coronets) [5], like Christian scriptures which claim that all people can be adopted sons and daughters of God, and can inherit a heavenly crown [6]. Gertrude is apparently damned for her “incestuous marriage” to her dead husband’s brother [7], scandalous and forbidden, especially after the divorce of Henry VIII from his first wife on s