Paul Adrian Fried / HAMLET'S BIBLE

Last week [1] I shared my belated realization that, after seeing Hamlet’s playlet that he calls “The Mousetrap” [2], Ophelia refers to a folktale in which a baker’s daughter is turned into an owl [3], and that an owl is a “living mousetrap.” For now, I’d like to call mousetraps masculine and externalizing, and owls, female and internalizing. In Shakespeare’s Elizabethan slang, a man had a “thing” between his legs, an external organ; a woman had a “nothing,” an “O,” which could potentially receive a man’s “thing” and which led to her womb, another “O” of potential.[4] Hamlet’s mousetrap analogy for a play to catch the king’s conscience [5] is an external thing, as the script and players (like moving parts of a mousetrap) are external to his body. One sets a mousetrap and waits.[6] In contrast, the owl, a living mousetrap, consumes mice, takes them inside itself, later regurgitating bones and hair. Mousetraps are externalizing and male, like rapiers that Hamlet and Laertes use ...

Today is Good Friday. In Shakespeare’s England, church rituals spoke of baptism as a dying to self in Christ, so as to be made new in him [1]. Contrary to some Shakespeare scholars who explicitly resist the idea of Christ-figures in the plays (including Harold Jenkins, Arden editor), all the baptized are called to be Christ-figures [2], imitators of Christ. The spiritual rhythm in medieval mystery, morality and miracle plays assumes all are sinners, but if they express sorrow for their sins, they can know God’s mercy and be saved. [3] Any drama in which a person who dies is saved, is a comedy; the only tragedies are those in which a sinner resists salvation. In her madness, Ophelia expresses regret through her story of the baker’s daughter [4]. Gertrude explains that Ophelia falls in the brook because of an “envious sliver” of willow [5]. Willows in Psalm 137 were incorporated weekly in Christian vespers and associated by St Benedict of Nursia [6] and Martin Luther [7] with the cruci...

How might we best grasp (“get a handle on”) Hamlet’s “Mousetrap,” the play-within-the-play? Thirteen handles (see also more lengthy endnotes corresponding to numbered list): 1. Hamlet asks the first player if he can play “The Murder of Gonzago.” This points to Francesco Maria I della Rovere, Duke of Urbino; whose wife was Eleonora Gonzaga, and who was marginalized (like Essex and Lord Strange, and poisoned like Strange).[1] 2. “The play’s the thing / Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the King.” — Hamlet says he will do this by reproducing events like his father’s murder with the help of the players.[2] 3. This conscience-trap echoes the prophet Nathan catching King David’s conscience in a story, after David’s affair with Bathsheba and arranging for the death of her husband.[3] 4. The play-within-the-play begins as a trap for the conscience of his mother, Queen Gertrude. — Later in Gertrude’s closet scene, it’s clear that Hamlet wants his mother to repent, a...