Paul Adrian Fried / HAMLET'S BIBLE

Some might think I missed a comma and that this post is about three people: Hamlet, his uncle Claudius, and Ptolemy, the astronomer. But in fact, the astronomer was a Roman citizen with “Claudius” as part of his name. What does this have to do with Shakespeare’s Danish tragedy? Ptolemy (circa 100 – 170 AD) was on the wrong side of science from an Elizabethan point of view. He thought that the earth was at the center, and that the sun and other heavenly objects went around the earth. About 350 years before Ptolemy, Aristarchus of Samos (310 – 230 BC) had said that the sun was at the center, but that idea didn’t catch on until the likes of Copernicus (1473 – 1543) and others. Certain passages in the Bible claimed that the sun moved, so the church was slow to endorse the Copernican paradigm. When Polonius reads Hamlet’s love letter to Ophelia, it includes the lines, Doubt thou the stars are fire; Doubt that the sun doth move; Doubt truth to be a liar; But never doubt I love. (2.2.124-12...

From Chapter 7 BRUNO AND SHAKESPEARE: HAMLET The Historical Context By HILARY GATTI [...] Those who wish to underline Shakespeare’s position in the course of British history between the end of the sixteenth century and the beginning of the seventeenth, when Hamlet was written and acted for the first time (1600–1601), often explain this dramatic change of mood by pointing to the final years of the long and fertile reign of Queen Elizabeth I, which would soon, in 1603, give way to the beginning of the more unpopular and conflictual story of the Stuart dynasty. For it seems difficult to deny that Shakespeare was possessed of an almost prophetic vision when, in the first decade of the seventeenth century, he elaborated his remarkable sequence of tragic stories of failed princes, who drag with them in their personal disaster the whole kingdom over which they should have reigned (King Lear, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra). Such tragedies surely have something to do with the coronation ...