Austin Tichnor on "Shakespeare’s sources transformed"

Austin Tichenor offers a good, brief article on Shakespeare's repurposing of sources, available at the Folger Shakespeare Library website. He writes:

"Charlotte Artese, author of Shakespeare and the Folktale, explained on the Folger’s Shakespeare Unlimitedpodcast that Shakespeare frequently refers to things that have little meaning to us now but would have been familiar to his audience then. Among her many examples, Artese cites Ophelia’s odd-seeming non-sequitur “They say the owl is a baker’s daughter” from her mad scene in Hamlet as referring to a folktale in which Jesus turns a baker’s daughter into an owl for giving him a meager portion of bread..."

And as I've argued before, the tale of the baker's daughter changed to an owl might best be considered as a repurposing/transformation of the gospel tale about the rich man and the beggar Lazarus - which is referred to by the ghost regarding his "lazar-like" skin after poisoning - and also referred to by Horatio in 5.2 as a paraphrase from the requiem Mass about Lazarus welcomed into heaven: "flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.”

So Shakespeare transforms and repurposes sources that had already represented transformations of earlier sources.

In Midsummer Night's Dream, Theseus speaks of a similar repurposing:

"And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name."

Tichenor begins with the example of Ovid's Metamorphoses:

It was only within the last two years that I realized Gertrude drinking from the cup poisoned by Hamlet's uncle/stepfather might be a transformation from the Metamorphoses of King Aegeus knocking from the hand of his son the cup that had been poisoned by his stepmother, Medea.

There are many commonly cited allusions in Shakespeare, but perhaps others still remaining to be noticed...

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Disclaimer: If and when I quote or paraphrase bible passages or mention religion in many of my blog posts, I do not intend to promote any religion over another, nor am I attempting to promote religious belief in general; only to explore how the Bible and religion influenced Shakespeare, his plays, and his age.
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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.

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https://pauladrianfried.blogspot.com/2019/12/top-20-hamlet-bible-posts.html

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