Paul Adrian Fried / HAMLET'S BIBLE

In Hamlet 1.4, Marcellus says, “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark” [1]. The rottenness in Denmark involves not only the lies of the murderous usurper Claudius and his “incestuous marriage,” but perhaps also the animosity between Denmark and Norway resulting from King Hamlet having killed Old Fortinbras in single combat decades earlier.[2] Denmark’s rottenness may feel related to the wastelands referenced in the Arthurian legends:   Uther Pendragon had attacked parts of what is now France and laid waste to it, where Claudas was later king and sometimes an enemy of Arthur and the knights of the Round Table. Like King Hamlet, Uther died by poison, leaving a son (Arthur). King Pellas is also a wasteland king: Pellas’ brother had been killed by Sir Balin while at a feast in Pellas’ castle. Pellas wanted revenge. Merlin had prophesied that Sir Balin would make a “dolorous stroke” whose harm would be exceeded only by that of the spear that pierced the side of Christ. Balin unk...

PRECEDENTS FOR HAMLET PLOT ELEMENTS—AND A VILLAIN NAMED CLAUDIUS— IN ARTHURIAN LEGENDS: One of the villains in the Arthurian legends is named Claudas, a variant of Claudius, the main villain in Shakespeare’s Hamlet . But in fact, the Arthurian legends contain many of the essential plot elements of Hamlet . Instead of “All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten,” we could say, many of the things Shakespeare and Saxo Grammaticus needed to know to write Hamlet , they could have learned from the Arthurian legends: - The ghost of a parent [1] and warrior [2]; - a prince (or king) who relates to soldiers and close friends as equals [3]; - questions of marital infidelity [4] and of broken marriage promises [5]; - knightly codes of honor and violence that conflict at times with courtesy and Christian values [6] - suicidal, love-forsaken women [7]; - the living body or dead corpse of a heartbroken woman, floating in a river or stream [8]; - contrast between characters who interpret ...

Shakespeare’s Hamlet famously contains a play-within-the-play, “The Mousetrap,” which (for some) calls to mind St. Augustine who said the cross of Christ was a mousetrap for the devil.[1] Ophelia refers to a folktale of a baker’s daughter changed into an owl, punishment for being ungenerous with a beggar (Jesus in disguise). Owls, as I have noted before [2], are living mousetraps. Shakespeare named Hamlet’s mother perhaps after St. Gertrude of Nivelles (c.628-659), famous for dealing with an infestation of mice in the convent’s larder [3]. I think of Gertrude at this time of year: Each autumn, we have had troubles with mice. We plugged holes, changed our cheap dryer vent years ago to an expensive one ($29-$39 - !) - which we assumed would keep mice out. We put heavy galvanized screen over a fireplace air intake, and checked the attached garage for openings where mice might get from the garage into the house. No luck. This fall, our expensive dryer vent cover had long since turned yel...

This Carl Jung quote made me think of Hamlet's dilemma and his descent into vengeful thoughts and actions:  "But what if I should discover that the least amongst them all, the poorest of all beggars, the most impudent of all offenders, yeah, the very fiend himself, that these are within me, and that I myself stand in need of the alms of my own kindness, that I myself am the enemy who must be loved. What then? Then, as a rule, the whole truth of Christianity is reversed: there is then no more talk of love and long-suffering; we say to the brother within us “Raca,” and condemn and rage against ourselves. We hide him from the world, we deny ever having met this least among the lowly in ourselves, and had it been God himself who drew near to us in this despicable form, we should have denied him a thousand times before a single cock had crowed. Anyone who uses modern psychology to look behind the scene not only of his patients’ lives, but more especially of his own life—and the m...