Linda Kay Hoff on Religious Bias in Hamlet Scholarship (part 14)
"Shakespeare quotes the Bible roughly 1,350 times, considerably more than any other playwright of the period. Ignoring religion when discussing his work is a bit like ignoring an elephant sitting on your sofa sipping a martini." - John R. Yamamoto-Wilson (from an online comment on a post here ) From Hamlet's Choice: Hamlet—A Reformation Allegory , by Linda Kay Hoff (1990): Hamlet is a play in which religious elements loom large. As such it has attracted an inordinate number of Catholic and Protestant apologist critics who, more than any other, "botch the words up fit to their own thought" * in trying to make of Hamlet a religious drama compatible with the preconceived religious beliefs that moved them to respond to the religious elements within Hamlet in the first place, usually with the transparent ulterior motive of aligning Shakespeare with themselves as their coreligionist. While many of these apologist critics have contributed useful explanations...