Paul Adrian Fried / HAMLET'S BIBLE

In The Odyssey, the weaving of Penelope, as a ruse to avoid her 108 suitors* later seems to find parallels not only in Ophelia and her sewing and reading, but also in Prince Hamlet. (Penelope and others fending off 108 suitors makes me think of the Buddhist idea of the importance of quieting the "monkey mind" of distractions!) Katherine Goodland has noted: Polonius wants Ophelia reading, to look like common images of Mary at the Annunciation. ( See this post .) [1] So now we have to think loosely, of Ophelia as associated in her sewing with Penelope, and in her reading, with Mary at the Annunciation; In a way, we might consider Penelope's weaving as a kind of compromised involvement with the world (to fend off suitors) and then a kind of prayer or repenting (unweaving, undoing the work), but also a kind of scheming for survival. Hamlet and Ophelia both have rhythms of compromised involvement in their world, followed by types of repenting or undoing: They weave...

In Shakespeare's play, Love's Labor's Lost, King Ferdinand of Navarre and his friends confess in the end that they made mistakes, or "sins" in the words of Lord Berowne. They had taken an oath to avoid the company of women, so when the Princess of France and her ladies in waiting show up, one of their sins is a failure of hospitality, forcing the women to camp out in tents outside the castle instead of welcoming them in. Another of their sins is that they quickly break their oath by falling in love with the women. They also make fools of themselves by dressing up as "Muscovites, or Russians" to profess their love, but the women exchange some articles of clothing to fool them (the fools!). The women confess their deception but blame the men, and the men confess their broken oaths and foolish behavior, but blame the women's beauty and heavenly eyes. The men have more to confess.... If it seems a bit like the Catholic sacrament of confession, it sh...