Paul Adrian Fried / HAMLET'S BIBLE

CLAUDIUS UNNAMED: Why – at the end of the reign of Elizabeth I – would Shakespeare have characters in Hamlet be silent regarding the king’s name, in a play involving an “incestuous marriage” in which the king marries his older brother’s widow? Some things could not be named. In the minds of audiences, the incestuous marriage would seem uncomfortably close to the first marriage of Henry VIII. For similar reasons, Richard II could not include the deposition scene when first published [1], and Shakespeare’s collaboration with John Fletcher on Henry VIII was not written or enacted until 1613 [2]. Why? Censorship, fear, and tact. Everyone knew that - Henry VIII, Elizabeth’s father, had married his older brother’s widow, and later divorced her, claiming it an incestuous marriage… - and that Elizabeth was sometimes called a “bastard queen”: Henry and Anne Boleyn had conceived Elizabeth out of wedlock; Elizabeth was born only three months after a secret marriage, making her ineligible in th...

Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury and Primate of England, was assassinated in the middle of the Christmas season, on 29, December, 1170. He was canonized quickly in February of 1173, considered a martyr and a kind of folk hero for resisting expansion of royal authority over things then believed to be matters of the church. Henry II was forced to apologize and to do penance for his role (intentional or not) that prompted Becket’s killing. Nearly four centuries later, about five years after Henry VIII had first sought annulment from his first wife to marry his mistress, Anne Boleyn, Henry broke from Rome, became head of England’s church, and received an English annulment instead of a Roman one. In another five years, he (along with Protestant reformers) suppressed Becket veneration and pilgrimage, claiming it idolatrous, disliking the idea of superstitious miracles that transcended scriptural truth. Henry didn’t want his power over his church to be challenged or limited by a Beck...

Given the fact that Shakespeare wrote during the English Reformation, a time of great conflict over religion, and given the many biblical and religious references scholars find in his plays, what factors may have come together to create the strong secular bias in criticism—especially in the early centuries after Shakespeare's death, but also persisting today? What factors may have led critics to claim that Shakespeare was more interested in universal truths than in the important political and religious issues of his time, for which some risked execution? [ Murder Most Foul: Hamlet Through the Ages , by David Bevington. Oxford University Press, 2011 . Fair use.] 1. Laws prohibited Shakespeare from writing too explicitly about certain religious and political topics. His silence on some of these topics resulted in ambiguities that may have been misread as disinterest, favoring universal and secular truths. 2. If Shakespeare had religious and political opinions at odds with the...