Paul Adrian Fried / HAMLET'S BIBLE

Part 44: Ophelia, Ariadne, Aegeus: Rejection, Ecstasy, Drowning After Ophelia’s father Polonius tells her to reject Hamlet [1], she obeys; later Hamlet is unkind to her and tells her, “Get thee to a nunnery” [2]. But the fact that her father forbade her to see him could not erase her feelings for him [3], or her hurt at being rejected. The story of Theseus, son of King Aegeus, and how he killed the Minotaur with help from Ariadne, was quite familiar in Shakespeare’s time, and the playwright even has Theseus as a character in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” Ariadne loved Theseus, as Ophelia seems to have loved Hamlet. But like Polonius, Ariadne’s father, King Minos, would not have approved. In the Greek myth, Theseus takes Ariadne with him when he leaves the island of Crete after defeating Ariadne’s half-brother, the Minotaur [4]. He later abandons her on the island of Naxos. Ophelia may feel similarly abandoned after Hamlet leaves for England [5] and her father is found dead and given...

Shakespeare was a thief of plot elements and tropes, like other playwrights of his time. Given that the original tale on which Hamlet is based doesn’t include a poison cup from a step-parent, secretly intended for the prince, but taken instead by the queen, where might that have come from? What uses of such a trope might have inspired Shakespeare? [1] Shakespeare was familiar with Ovid’s Metamorphosis from Latin school and from Arthur Golding’s 1567 translation. This included tales of Medea in Book VII. These include a story about a poison cup that Medea intends for her stepson Theseus, but which is knocked from his hand at the last moment by his father, king Aegeus, who recognizes his son. This may have informed Shakespeare’s use of the poison cup theme in Hamlet. But Shakespeare switches the roles of the step-mother-poisoner and the father-savior so that it’s the stepfather Claudius who intends to poison his stepson, and the mother, Gertrude, who buys her son time by drinking...