Paul Adrian Fried / HAMLET'S BIBLE

Excerpt: ...getting playgoers and readers to imagine a pregnant, or carnal, Ophelia amounts to a dramatic benefit because, at some point (usually a retrospective moment), the recollection of this identity obviously compounds the pathos of her personal tragedy. At the same time, those contemporary consumers of Hamlet aware of an Elizabethan aesthetics of the pregnant imagination are likely to question their reconstruction of Ophelia’s sexual status, simply be- cause they know that her supposed pregnancy could be the result of the operation of their pregnant minds on the elements of Shakespeare’s play. In other words, Shakespeare calls attention to the challenging plastic quality of mind that he generally seems always to require of his educated theater readers and playgoers. Every play in the Shakespeare canon, virtually every Shakespearean character, becomes richly enjoyable and instructive to the degree that pregnant minds animate them. Shakespeare’s urging the pregnant mind to make ...

If Londoners in Shakespeare’s England heard that his play, Hamlet, was in part about the incestuous marriage of a king, what did they expect? Elizabeth was still queen when it was first performed, and still remembered long after James took the throne. Some thought she was only legitimate if her father, Henry VIII, had been right to divorce his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, over claims that the marriage violated biblical laws.[1] There had been a popular earlier play, A Looking Glass for London, about a king saved from an incestuous marriage by an act of God (lightning bolt). The king heeds a prophet sent by God and repents. Happy ending. Such a play could affirm Protestant Elizabethan hopes, that yes, biblically incestuous marriage is wrong, and Henry VIII was right to divorce Catherine, although the pope disagreed. And yes, he was right to break with Rome to get his divorce. Therefore, his second marriage was legitimate, Elizabeth was legitimate, and all was right with the ...