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...

Shakespeare’s Hamlet is a play that is in part about how we relate to the dead: What, if anything, do we owe the dead? What can we do for them, or they for us? The play bears the scars of the Reformation. The ghost seems to be Catholic, but his son was sent to study at Wittenberg, made famous in part by Martin Luther. Long before Calvin and Luther, the Catholic Church had made efforts at reform in fits and starts, some successful, many not. Many Catholic theologians and historians believe that reformation thinkers like Martin Luther were correct in their perception of abuses in need of reform, and of stubborn resistance. Protestantism cut off many of the faithful from the idea that they could ask saints to intercede for them, to pray with them, to advocate for them. The first of the Ten Commandments said that there was only one God, and that believers were to worship that God alone. And yet the creed also taught that there was a resurrection, and that living Christians were united in...