Paul Adrian Fried / HAMLET'S BIBLE

Shakespeare's age was marked in part by a Protestant-Catholic feud echoed perhaps in the feud between Capulets and Montagues in Romeo and Juliet . Dennis Taylor (author of Shakespeare and the Elizabethan Reformation: Literary Negotiation of Religious Difference ), has a web page of notes[1] (from which the following is taken) related to Shakespeare and Catholic-Protestant issues; under the year 1984, he has this interesting note on some ideas from Paul Tillich, which may offer a refreshing alternative to the Elizabethan Protestant-Catholic conflict: ~~~~~ Tillich, The Protestant Era: “The decrease in sacramental thinking and feeling in the churches of the Reformation and in the American denominations is appalling. Nature has lost its religious meaning and is excluded [from] participation in the power of salvation … The Protestant protest has rightly destroyed the magical elements in Catholic sacramentalism but has wrongly brought to the verge of disappearance the sacramental foun...

"So critics want to see Shakespeare as early modern and secular, but Shakespeare is also Late Medieval and Christian. And tragedy for Shakespeare is, I would say, essentially the same thing it is for 15th century, 16th century vernacular drama: tragedy is the failure of a sinner to repent. Whereas for Aristotle, tragedy is something very alien to a Christian sensibility. Aristotle doesn't really care about moral character. [PF note: in the context of his poetic, though he does care about moral character in his ethics]. What Aristotle means by 'hamartia' is not sin, but something more like a mistake. And what he means by 'anagnorisis' is not repentance, but something more like a discovery, like a correction of an error as regards to matters of fact. So for Aristotle, tragedy is amoral: it's like the process of legal discovery that occurs in a court of law. Nonetheless, I think many critics continue to use Aristotle's terms to describe Shakespeare's...

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...