Paul Adrian Fried / HAMLET'S BIBLE

This Carl Jung quote made me think of Hamlet's dilemma and his descent into vengeful thoughts and actions:  "But what if I should discover that the least amongst them all, the poorest of all beggars, the most impudent of all offenders, yeah, the very fiend himself, that these are within me, and that I myself stand in need of the alms of my own kindness, that I myself am the enemy who must be loved. What then? Then, as a rule, the whole truth of Christianity is reversed: there is then no more talk of love and long-suffering; we say to the brother within us “Raca,” and condemn and rage against ourselves. We hide him from the world, we deny ever having met this least among the lowly in ourselves, and had it been God himself who drew near to us in this despicable form, we should have denied him a thousand times before a single cock had crowed. Anyone who uses modern psychology to look behind the scene not only of his patients’ lives, but more especially of his own life—and the m...

I am reposting some thoughts from Charlotte Scott, who extends some ideas of Julia Kristeva regarding the “ick” and the “abject”: [1] Charlotte writes, “Whilst the abject may be those things, fluids, forms, faeces that we ‘thrust aside in order to live’, (Kristeva) the ick is what we reject in order not to become.” Often we may fail to attend closely to the elements she identifies in Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing and Twelfth Night: We feel a cathartic effect as we view or read the plays, but at times we may become too familiar with them, or with scholarly theories that address them. But when people like Charlotte Scott draw attention to them like this, following a kind of golden thread (Blake) [2], we become defamiliarized (Viktor Shklovsky) enough to give it fresh attention. In Hamlet, Claudius, as murderer of his brother and usurper of the throne, would greatly prefer that Hamlet “thrust aside” his mourning “in order to live,” and Gertrude joins him in discouraging Hamlet’s m...

In the last few weeks, my research that started with the Lazarus allusion in Hamlet 1.5 ("lazarlike") has moved out in concentric circles or spirals, from Lazarus and the rich man, to King Hamlet and to his stealthy, usurper-brother, Claudius, who has stolen the kingdom - and its queen. So already we have broadened our scope from rich men and beggars, to kings, thieves and usurpers: The king seems to play the role of the rich man, and Claudius may have been like one of the beggars neglected too long , and who finally turned thief and murderer. I also considered how the theft of the commons created more poverty, more beggars, the criminalization of beggars and vagabonds created more hardships , and how Shakespeare was familiar with bread riots, and included such things in his plays . [Coriolan supplié par sa famille (Coriolanus begged by his family), circa 1652-1653, by Nicolas Poussin (1594–1665), Musée Nicolas-Poussin, Les Andelys. Photographed by Aiwaz....