Paul Adrian Fried / HAMLET'S BIBLE

In Shakespeare’s lifetime (as in ours for some), there was an anti-Semitic tendency among Christians to view Judaism as an inferior faith and to view Jesus, Son-figure of a Trinitarian God, as Judaism’s promised messiah sent to redeem humanity from their sins, establishing a "one true faith." An alternative view: Jesus was a Jew, and a reformer, who lived and preached at a time when Judaism had been corrupted in large part by the Roman occupation. Reformers like Jan Hus, Luther and Calvin may have thought it too proud to consider their own reformer-roles analogous to that of Jesus (Luther once referred to tales of medieval monks, including one about a monk who destroyed a chair he had made because he believed he had become too proud of it). But in fact we might consider that they attempted to do for Christianity something analogous to what Jesus attempted to do for Judaism. Hamlet contains references to many reformers: - St. Gis (Jesus). - Wittenberg, where Luthe...

This is part 10 in a series on the allusion in Hamlet 1.5 to the beggar Lazarus in Luke 16. Previous posts have considered aspects of leprosy in England ("Lazar-houses,"), the legal status of beggars and vagabonds, and some aspects of the historical context of the Biblical tale in its original context. For an index of posts in this series, see the end of this post. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ SOMETIMES, part of the fun of research is what one finds by accident in the process of looking for other things. This was the case in my search for the official homilies of Cranmer and Jewell mentioning beggar Lazarus of Luke 16, alluded to by the ghost in Hamlet 1.5. There are three such homilies. This blog post contains my annotations for the first, “An Exhortation Against the Fear of Death.” We cannot travel back in time and experience what it might have been like to attend Shakespeare's Hamlet at the Globe, and then attend church and hear sermons of Cranmer a...