Paul Adrian Fried / HAMLET'S BIBLE

In 2020, Connor Hanratty [1] posted about “the owl was a baker’s daughter” [2], touching only briefly on the folktale allusion (not mentioning its strong resemblance to the gospel tale of Lazarus and the rich man [3]). Hanratty mentions an 1851 source about an ancient connection between baker's daughters and prostitutes. Presumably, prostitutes waited for customers at bakeries, and "On certain festivals, the master bakers sold nothing but sacrificial breads, and at the same time they had slave girls or servant maids who prostituted themselves day and night in the bakery.” [4] This, like many Freudian readings, may seem a sexually reductionist explanation. But note: Both the baker's daughter in the tale, and the prostitute, are concerned with monetary profit, when what they offer might also be considered a gift: In a healthy relationship, sexual pleasure might best be a mutual gift, not a for-profit exchange. In a healthy community, beggars get fed (as do potential prostitu...

Three official Cranmer & Jewell homilies mention the beggar Lazarus - and have many other connections to Hamlet. Shakespeare heard these homilies many times during his life. The first, “An Exhortation Against The Fear Of Death” (Cranmer) comes uncomfortably close to conflating beggars and thieves (not necessarily synonymous). I will consider these three homilies in upcoming weeks, but for this week, will focus on a few key ideas from this one. Some consider Shakespeare an atheist, but he probably didn’t (always) work secretly on poems and plays while homilies were read in church; in fact, he utilized their ideas and vocabulary in his writing, making them his own. Yes, if one is an atheist and wishes to view Shakespeare as an atheist because of certain things certain characters say, it's possible to find evidence for that. And it's certainly possible to sit in church while a priest is talking, and to have one's thoughts on other things instead of listening. But...

When Hamlet tells Polonius he is a "fishmonger" (which many read as also meaning "flesh-monger" or pimp), and later associates Polonius with Jephthah (son of a harlot or prostitute), we might paraphrase the title of the Tina Turner song, "What's Love Got to Do With It?" In our case, we might ask: What's prostitution got to do with it? At least one way of viewing prostitution is that it takes what may be at best relationships of mutual and reciprocal gift-giving, and corrupts them by reducing them to market transactions, this-for-that, without nurturing ongoing and transcendent bonds on which communities depend if they are to have a future. Some may view this reading of prostitution as moralistic and oppressive, as if to assert that sex belongs only in marriage, and that perhaps all transactions of the marketplace are evil, whereas only gift-exchange that builds community is good. That is not my objective here, as I hope will become more clea...