Paul Adrian Fried / HAMLET'S BIBLE

“...there's not a hair on [his] head but 'tis a Valentine.” Two Gentlemen of Verona (3.1.195-195) This line is spoken about Valentine, one of the two main characters in the play. Two Gentlemen of Verona is an early Shakespeare play based on a Spanish source among others. It also contains many elements that show up in his later plays: - A woman (Julia) disguised as a man (Sebastian), an element also found in Twelfth Night , As You Like It , The Merchant of Venice , and Cymbeline ; - A character who (sometimes) goes by the name Sebastian (as in Twelfth Night ); - Talk of a couple eloping with a rope ladder (sort of like Romeo and Juliet ); - Couples escaping to the woods (also a theme in As You Like It and A Midsummer Night’s Dream ). - A resolved love triangle: Proteus who had been engaged to Julie thinks he is in love with Silvia (similar to Demetrius in A Midsummer Night’s Dream , who had been in love with Helena, but who thinks he loves Hermia, and Hermia’s love, Lysande...

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...

It is LGBTQ+ Pride Month in the United States[1], a celebration observed at various times of the year by a number of other countries around the globe. If you were an Elizabethan playwright and poet named William Shakespeare, you may have questioned certain passages of the Bible used by religious authorities to condemn sex between men, and used to justify related punishments of execution.[2]  Yet in Elizabethan England, one would not have been able to have a play approved for performance by the master of revels if it included a virtuous character who complained about unhelpful and outdated biblical laws. How might you have challenged such use of the Bible without getting in trouble with authorities? One could dramatize a conflict stemming from an outdated Roman or Athenian law that is analogous to an outdated biblical law, and in that way, by indirection, make the same point [3]. (I am not the first to notice this.) Early in the first scene of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Drea...