Paul Adrian Fried / HAMLET'S BIBLE

Shakespeare's Hamlet is often cited as his play that most specifically references Christmas: "that season [...] Wherein our Savior’s birth is celebrated" (1.1.173-4). Besides Jesus, the play alludes to Caesar three times [1] and twice to “tax” (verb) [2]. This involves two claims to divinity: Jesus as "Son of God," and emperors proclaimed divine after death. Hamlet also (idolatrously?) likens his father to Hyperion (1.2 and 3.4), and also (3.4) to Jove, Mars, and Mercury, and says a man is "in apprehension... like a god” [3]. These allusions link Hamlet to a familiar Christmas gospel reading, which sets the stage for how a census allegedly [4] displaced Mary and Joseph of Nazareth, required to go to Bethlehem: “And it came to pass in those days, that there came a decree from Augustus Caesar, that all the world should be taxed.” (Luke 2:1) The census of Augustus, probably to project tax revenue and empire expansion [5], is like hoarding rich men in the gospe...

My previous post noted that Hamlet alludes to John the Baptist [1]. Consider the religious, symbolic, and political significance of John baptizing at the Jordan [2], for Jews who knew their founding story by heart, that Moses led their ancestors through parted waters of the Red Sea to freedom and a promised land, escaping a foreign oppressor [3].  John at the Jordan plays into the same tropes, where Rome (not Egypt) is the foreign oppressor (which in part explains why Rome and Herod Antipas saw him as a threat). England’s Henry VIII claimed he needed to repent of incest, had seen action in battle, but was thought to have died a sinful man, guilty of foul crimes. Hamlet deals with an incestuous king and the ghost of a king, fearsome in battle, who died with sins on his soul, foul crimes. Same tropes. Hamlet alludes to both Julius Caesar and Jesus. Consider Jesus, preaching where Roman coins bore the image of a Roman emperor [4] with an inscription calling the emperor “son of a go...

In Shakespeare's England, the 3rd and 4th Sundays of Advent (before Christmas) featured John the Baptist [1], a prophet referred to in Hamlet. The name is feminized to "Baptista" and given to the player queen in 3.2. Hamlet claims "The Mousetrap" or "Murder of Gonzago" was an existing ("extant") historical tale [2]. In fact a Duke of Urbino (not Vienna) was poisoned; Eleanor Gonzaga was his wife. The wife of a predecessor was Battista Sforza [3]. Shakespeare made historical errors on purpose: Hamlet picks the duke’s predecessor’s wife’s name to borrow the name Baptista, so he can allude to John the Baptist, who condemned the marriage of Herod Antipas to his brother's divorced wife [4]. Hamlet wants to catch the king's conscience [5], but must avoid being too confrontational, so he borrows "Baptista" to subtly evoke (but also cleverly distract from) a biblical allusion to Jesus’ kinsman [6] who was beheaded for opposing a k...

Thomas More and Hamlet’s uncle Claudius were both, in their own ways, defenders of incestuous marriage. More would not agree to Henry VIII’s plan to break from Rome to get his divorce from his first wife, a marriage that the church had considered incestuous from the start: Henry and Catherine had to ask Rome for special permission to marry in the first place [1]. So for Hamlet to refer to Claudius as a “moor” - meaning also a “More” - would be entirely appropriate.  In Act 3, scene 4, when Hamlet refers to his father favorably as a “fair mountain” and his uncle insultingly as a "moor," to the Elizabethan ear, audiences heard no difference between "moor," or "Moor," or the last name of Thomas More [2].  Today, many may consider Thomas More a martyr for conscience who opposed Henry’s quest for divorce [3]. There is nothing wrong with this view, but it is incomplete: It doesn’t consider how some Elizabethans understood More.  By the end of her life, Elizabe...