Paul Adrian Fried / HAMLET'S BIBLE

QUEEN: [...] for your part, Ophelia, I do wish That your good beauties be the happy cause Of Hamlet’s wildness. So shall I hope your virtues Will bring him to his wonted way again, To both your honors. OPHELIA  Madam, I wish it may.  (3.1.42-47)   Queen Gertrude expresses hope that Ophelia’s father Polonius may be correct in thinking that Hamlet is mad for the loss of Ophelia’s love. Shakespeare often described love as a madness in need of a cure.[1] This may be more significant than one might assume at first glance, for at least three reasons.   First, Gertrude’s comments apply not only to her son but also to her new husband, even if she doesn’t know it. For Claudius to kill his brother and take the throne and his brother’s wife seems a kind of madness. Gertrude’s “virtues” were not enough to cure him. Secondly, “The face that launched a thousand ships” is the famous Christopher Marlowe line describing the beauty of Helen of Troy. To steal her, Paris risked war, w...

Consider how the impulse behind male resistance to women’s suffrage may have also manifested itself in male scholarly bias about Ophelia and Gertrude. If one feels women are too emotional, not rational enough to deserve to vote, how might that color one’s reading of Ophelia’s madness and drowning, and of Gertrude’s decision to drink from what Claudius knows is a poison cup, intended for Hamlet?  Women were not admitted to study at Oxford until 1920, and did not get the vote in England until 1918. (In other words, women have only had the vote in the UK for 100 years, out of four centuries of Shakespeare; and the vote is only one of many possible indicators of male bias.) It is easy to imagine average male literary critics writing off Ophelia’s many lines in Act 4, scene 5, as simply mad ravings, rather than finding any method in her madness; easy to imagine them missing how she acts like a court fool [1], or like Hamlet’s promised, handfast wife and queen regent in his absence [2]...

For Halloween, what can we learn from Shakespeare’s Hamlet on how to speak to ghosts? First Horatio, and later, Hamlet, both try. HORATIO What art thou that usurp’st this time of night, Together with that fair and warlike form In which the majesty of buried Denmark Did sometimes march? By heaven, I charge thee, Speak. (1.1.54-58) Horatio calls the ghost a usurper of the night and of the appearance of the dead king. Marcellus thinks Horatio has offended the ghost (perhaps true, especially since Claudius, brother to the king, was the usurper). Soon the ghost appears again. This time Horatio’s attempts seem informed by his university learning, questioning the ghost, asking if can foresee Denmark’s future, or knows of buried treasure: HORATIO: Stay, illusion! [...] If thou hast any sound or use of voice, Speak to me. If there be any good thing to be done That may to thee do ease and grace to me, Speak to me. If thou art privy to thy country’s fate, Which happily foreknowing may avoid, O, ...

From the chapter, “On Ghosts” (131-171) from the book, The Character of Hamlet by John Erskine Hankins (1941), regarding 5 options for different beliefs regarding ghosts, represented by various characters in Hamlet. [1] [Upper left: Paapa Essiedu as Hamlet and Ewart James Walters as Ghost in 2018 RSC production of Hamlet, photo by Manuel Harlan via RSC, cropped . Fair use. Upper right: Illustration of the ghost by Thomas Ridgeway Gould from an 1890 printing of Hamlet, public domain, via Wikipedia . Lower right: Paul Scofield as the ghost in Hamlet, 1990, directed by Franco Zeffirelli. Photo via The Guardian . Fair use. Lower left: Engraving, "Hamlet, Horatio, Marcellus, and the Ghost, on platform before the Palace of Elsinor," by Robert Thew (1758–1802) After Henry Fuseli (1741–1825), September 29, 1796, after a 1789 painting by Kaufmann. Public domain. Via Wikimedia and The Huntington Library and Museum (Huntington.org) .] 1. “All supernatural apparitions, includin...

This past week, three sources came together to nudge me toward thinking in new ways about the ghost in Hamlet . [Images: Left: Screen-shot of headline and Ian McKellen from Michael Billington article in The Guardian (see below). Fair use. Right: Michael Keaton in Beetlejuice , directed by Tim Burton, 1988, warner Brothers, image via IMDB . Fair use.] The first was an article in The Guardian by critic Michael Billington regarding a new film called The Hamlet Within . It mentioned productions of the play that portray the ghost as an inner voice of Hamlet rather than the manifestation witnessed by the sentinels and Horatio in the opening scene. The second was when Shobha Pawar sent a link to an excellent YouTube video by John Berger from the 1970s, about how our experience of art and of its meanings changes over time , especially after technological changes that allow mass replication of famous art images. The third was a “Speaking of Shakespeare” video on Shakespeare and th...

[Stephen Christopher Anthony (who played Evan Hansen in Minneapolis), on tour (image from Youtube); David Tennant as Hamlet, image from The Guardian] This past June 7, my daughter, spouse and I saw Dear Evan Hansen in Minneapolis at the Orpheum Theatre. The 2017 Tony Award winner is on tour, and it was very moving. I'd heard and liked many of the songs already. But in the context of the play, lines of lyrics that I had taken to be commonplace phrases or idioms ("When you're fallin' in a forest and there's nobody around, do you ever really crash or even make a sound?") suddenly took on new meaning in light of the unfolding plot. These included early lines about climbing trees, / falling, / being found, someone will come running, / etc. Three-fourths of the way through the show, we gasped with insight. (I will try to avoid spoilers....) It made us want to see it again, knowing what we came to know. By the end, I also realized that Dear Evan Hansen als...