Paul Adrian Fried / HAMLET'S BIBLE

The Rocky Mountain Medieval & Renaissance Association (RMMRA) conference in Denver, April 11-13, was amazing, very thought-provoking and affirming, so while still glowing, I wanted to share a few things about how it went and what impressed me. First, I volunteered to chair a session about male shame and honor in medieval texts, including the poem, "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight." Three graduate students in the Institute for Medieval Studies at The University of New Mexico presented papers. To prepare, I read some literature on the psychology of shame, and also reviewed some literature on gift economies (Lewis Hyde's The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property , a cult favorite). The presenters seemed to assume at first that it was a binary: Either honor or shame, and that this was mostly related to warrior culture. In fact, I found that gift dynamics are inextricably tied in with these other dynamics of violence, honor, and shame, and I would go so far a...

This week I am headed to Denver, Colorado, for a meeting of the Rocky Mountain Medieval and Renaissance Association (instead of attending the Shakespeare Association of America conference in Washington D.C., which was tempting for its proximity to the Folger Shakespeare Library). I am presenting a paper called “How Gadamer Might Rethink Shakespeare & the Bible,” in which I consider how a Protestant bias of “Scripture Alone” (Sola Scriptura), and an empirical bias of the emerging sciences in the mid-1800s, established an early tradition that favored very literal references in biblical allusions that utilized biblical names and phrases, over paraphrase and plot echo, which are often relatively neglected by many of the main reference books in the field. (Darwin's book, On the Origin of Species , was published just five years before Charles Wordsworth's 1864 book on Shakespeare and the Bible, and it, too, is obsessed with empirical evidence and close observation). These b...

[Illustration: Bottom the Weaver from Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream , by Arthur Rackham, 1939] In the last few years, I have been reading as many books and essays about Shakespeare and religion as I can get my hands on, and among the many things that strike me is this: Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, and other critics can read the same text and come away with very different interpretations, even paying attention to the same details. Of course, this makes perfect sense, and Shakespeare implies that this will happen through certain lines in Hamlet. Readers or viewers bring different assumptions to their experience of the plays, and they often exercise a kind of confirmation bias, noticing details that confirm their assumptions or biases. We all do this, of course, and in part, it's what makes academic research interesting: to discover what people with different experiences, assumptions, and biases make of the same text. But when you've been wrestling with th...

I recently learned that The Rocky Mountain Medieval & Renaissance Association April 2019 conference accepted my paper proposal, imagining how the late Hans Georg Gadamer might rethink Shakespeare and the Bible. The Stanford 
Encyclopedia of Philosophy describes Gadamer as
 “the decisive figure in the 
development of twentieth-century hermeneutics” and “undoubtedly… one of the 
most important thinkers 
of the twentieth century.” As a college student 40 years ago, I attended a dinner where Gadamer spoke. My professors had me sitting right next to him at the meal. I asked him his impression of the U.S. on his trip, and he said Americans were “very proud.” Pride is not always a good thing: it can impede understanding. Gadamer stresses that scholarly writing about literature and the arts should not strive to follow scientific or empirical methods because the arts will always transcend what can be accounted for by the rigors of science. Yet many early efforts to catalog biblical all...