Paul Adrian Fried / HAMLET'S BIBLE

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...

In David Bevington's book Murder Most Foul: Hamlet Through the Ages, Bevington includes the following parenthetical observation regarding suicides: (Coroners in Shakespeare's day were instructed to issue of suicide in such dubious cases, partly because swimming was regarded as reckless self-endangerment and thus virtually a suicidal act, but more importantly because the estate of the deceased would then go to the crown.) (60) Bevington died last summer in his late 80s, and the book was first published in 2011 when he was about 80. On this point in the parenthetical above, there is no footnote, no mention in the end notes. (If this is a commonly-known understanding, and if many other sources confirm it, and if you are aware of some of those, please let me know). The general logic is that suicide is self-murder, and murder violates one of the ten commandments ("thou shalt not kill"), so a suicide (or even an attempted suicide) is therefore a criminal, and the land...

IF HAMLET SCHOLARS tried to interpret the play too exclusively in terms of the slim biographical facts we know about Shakespeare, expanding that understanding through perhaps baseless speculation on what we don't know about the playwright, we might be correct to criticize them as perhaps guilty of the biographical fallacy, a kind of reductionism that views work too exclusively as commentary about the author. If scholars did the same too exclusively with certain historical facts - about the "incestuous marriage" of Henry VIII that led to the English Reformation, or Elizabeth I's Lord Treasurer, William Cecil, or Cecil's daughter who, like Ophelia, died under suspicious circumstances - then we might do well to criticize the approach as a kind of historical reductionism - as if the meaning of the play is "nothing but" veiled commentary on certain historical events. (Some readers seem reductionist in this way, claiming the prince is nothing but a kind of...