Paul Adrian Fried / HAMLET'S BIBLE

With, hoo! such bugs and goblins in my life... - Hamlet 5.2.25 [1] This is my favorite Halloween-themed line in Hamlet, from the last scene, at the start of which Hamlet describes to Horatio how he discovered the letter with orders from Claudius for England to execute Hamlet (by beheading) upon their ship's arrival there. Frightening stuff! In many places around the world, some people will observe Halloween, the evening of 31 October, "All Hallows Eve," with its roots in Christian tradition of celebrating All Souls this day, and anticipating the Feast of All Saints tomorrow, November 1. It is harvest time, and so we also consider death as a harvest of souls. It is a good time of year for such stuff, with cold weather, and with leaves changing color in the Northern Hemisphere approaching winter. Hamlet famously converses with an apparition that claims to be the ghost of his father, after the apparition had been previously seen a number of times by sentinels, finall...

With, hoo! such bugs and goblins in my life... Hamlet 5.2.25 [1] This is my favorite Halloween-themed line in Hamlet , from the last scene, at the start of which Hamlet describes to Horatio how he discovered the letter with orders from Claudius for England to execute Hamlet (by beheading) upon their ship's arrival there. In the USA, we are approaching Halloween, the evening of 31 October, "All Hallows Eve," before All Saints Day. Children dress in costumes, go door to door and ask, "Trick or treat?" and often receive a treat of some kind. Usually too much manufactured sugary-candy (one of the reasons the USA has so many diabetics...). 2022 SCSC, Minneapolis: This Year, the Sixteenth Century Society and Conference has its convention in Minneapolis, Minnesota, only about an hour's drive from where I live. I will be giving a paper/presentation touching on how Shakespeare had to carefully encode his critique of government and the state religion, and h...