Paul Adrian Fried / HAMLET'S BIBLE

"Shakespeare quotes the Bible roughly 1,350 times, considerably more than any other playwright of the period. Ignoring religion when discussing his work is a bit like ignoring an elephant sitting on your sofa sipping a martini." - John R. Yamamoto-Wilson (from an online comment on a post here ) From Hamlet's Choice: Hamlet—A Reformation Allegory , by Linda Kay Hoff (1990): Hamlet is a play in which religious elements loom large. As such it has attracted an inordinate number of Catholic and Protestant apologist critics who, more than any other, "botch the words up fit to their own thought" * in trying to make of Hamlet a religious drama compatible with the preconceived religious beliefs that moved them to respond to the religious elements within Hamlet in the first place, usually with the transparent ulterior motive of aligning Shakespeare with themselves as their coreligionist. While many of these apologist critics have contributed useful explanations...

Old King Hamlet as Caesar figure, not Christ figure After the death of King Hamlet, the sentinels are nervous confronting one another at the end of Francesco’s shift and the start of Bernardo’s. They are also anxious about why Denmark is so busy preparing for war. Shakespeare’s play was written at a time when many Protestants thought biblical prophecies in the biblical books of Revelations and Daniel were coming true (see Apocalypse & Armada in Kyd's Spanish Tragedy by Frank R. Ardolino); many believed the end times were approaching, and that Rome was the Whore of Babylon. The Dover Straits earthquake of 1580, a 1598 appearance of Haley’s Comet, and a 1598 total eclipse visible across much of England and Scotland (“disasters in the sun”) only increased such speculation. Bernardo and Marcellus tell Horatio about the hour of the night when the ghost had appeared and begin describing the positions of the stars, when the ghost appears again. After the ghost leaves, as Horatio...