Paul Adrian Fried / HAMLET'S BIBLE

Why is there an echo of the names of two friends of Dr. Faustus, from the Christopher Marlowe play, in Shakespeare’s Hamlet? It’s like an Easter Egg [1]. Fans of the 1982 film, E.T., have noticed that one of the Halloween trick-or-treaters wears a Yoda costume, a Star Wars reference, and that in the 1999 film, The Phantom Menace, some members of the galactic senate appear as if from E.T.’s home world. An Easter Egg in this context is often another way of saying “allusion.” If you know the feelings associated with an image or line in one film, later characters (within or outside of that particular franchise) can repeat that phrase to evoke a similar idea or feeling, with variations. Filmmakers know that many moviegoers are “literate” in this way regarding other films. The same was true of Shakespeare, who knew that many in his audiences were familiar with Christopher Marlowe’s plays, including Dr. Faustus. Massaro and Usher noted in 2022 that the names Cornelius and Voltemand, Ambassa...

Last week my post addressed the anxiety of characters in Hamlet about the missing body of Polonius, compared to that of the women at the tomb regarding the corpse of Jesus . [Images: Illuminations from Folio 117r of the Pericopes of Henry II, Reichenau, c. 1002–1012: The Three Marys, and the Angel at the Empty Tomb. Public domain, via Wikipedia , and fair use, via Flickr .] If Shakespeare is satirizing William Cecil as Polonius (and as *the antithesis of Jesus*), the point is not to affirm belief in a resurrection of Christ, but to perform political satire. But there is more to this missing body business (as there usually is with Shakespeare). Consider certain claims about William Cecil and the Privy Council before we return to Polonius: Robert Persons, a Jesuit priest, claimed in 1592 that there was a "school of atheism" in England centered on Sir Walter Raleigh . Atheism in Elizabethan England was a label for many things, including those (like later US Pres...