Paul Adrian Fried / HAMLET'S BIBLE

HUGGER-MUGGER: Shakespeare has Claudius use these words to describe the burial of Polonius in Hamlet 4.5. "Hugger-mugger" means "secret," "chaotic," "clandestine, sly," or "disorderly, chaotic" [1].  Shakespeare consulted the 1579 Thomas North translation of Plutarch, which used “hugger-mugger” to describe the burial of Julius Caesar [2]. Polonius once played Julius Caesar in a play production, as he reveals to Hamlet in 3.2.  HUGGER-MUGGER as HOARDING a SECRET:  To do something secretly is to hoard the knowledge of the thing: Claudius hoards not only knowledge of the secret burial of Polonius, but also of his murder of his own brother.  IMPOSTUME:  Observing Norway’s troops ready to invade Poland, Hamlet notes:  This is th’ impostume of much wealth and peace, That inward breaks and shows no cause without Why the man dies. (4.4.28-30) An impostume is an abscess, as if the body is secretly hoarding puss from an infection. Hamlet impli...

References to Julius Caesar in Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” from Horatio (1.1) and from Polonius (3.2) may remind us that Shakespeare’s play, Julius Caesar (published 1599), only shortly preceded his Hamlet (published 1603-4); the earlier play may still have been in the company’s repertoire. But besides good advertising, why mention Julius in this play? HORATIO: “In the most high and palmy state of Rome, A little ere the mightiest Julius fell, The graves stood tenantless, and the sheeted dead Did squeak and gibber in the Roman streets” (1.1.125-8) Horatio is at first a doubting Thomas, yet he mentions not graves opening after Jesus’ death (Matt 27:51-53), but another J.C.: Julius Caesar, tyrant who crossed the Rubicon with his army, violating the social order. Polonius mentions playing Caesar at university, killed in the capital: “Brutus killed me.” HAMLET: It was a brute part of him to kill so capital a calf there.” (3.2.111-2) This foreshadows that Hamlet will stab Polonius in a later sce...

Hamlet is the only Shakespeare play that references not merely the word "Christmas" or the secularized holiday, but the biblical/religious focus of Christmas: "that season [...] Wherein our Savior’s birth is celebrated" (1.1.173-4). Besides Jesus, the play alludes to Caesar three times [1] and twice to “tax” (verb) [2]. This involves two claims to divinity: Jesus as "Son of God," and emperors proclaimed divine after death. Hamlet also (idolatrously?) likens his father to Hamlet compares his father to Hyperion (in 1.2.144 and 3.4.66), and also to Jove (3.4.66), Mars (3.4.67), and Mercury (3.4.68), and says a man is "in apprehension... like a god” [3]. These allusions link Hamlet to a familiar Christmas gospel reading, which sets the stage for how a census allegedly [4] displaced Mary and Joseph of Nazareth, required to go to Bethlehem: “And it came to pass in those days, that there came a decree from Augustus Caesar, that all the world should be taxe...

My previous post noted that Hamlet alludes to John the Baptist [1]. Consider the religious, symbolic, and political significance of John baptizing at the Jordan [2], for Jews who knew their founding story by heart, that Moses led their ancestors through parted waters of the Red Sea to freedom and a promised land, escaping a foreign oppressor [3].  John at the Jordan plays into the same tropes, where Rome (not Egypt) is the foreign oppressor (which in part explains why Rome and Herod Antipas saw him as a threat). England’s Henry VIII claimed he needed to repent of incest, had seen action in battle, but was thought to have died a sinful man, guilty of foul crimes. Hamlet deals with an incestuous king and the ghost of a king, fearsome in battle, who died with sins on his soul, foul crimes. Same tropes. Hamlet alludes to both Julius Caesar and Jesus. Consider Jesus, preaching where Roman coins bore the image of a Roman emperor [4] with an inscription calling the emperor “son of a go...

The FEAST of the EPIPHANY in churches of Shakespeare’s time [1], JANUARY 6, celebrates the magi “from the east” who followed a star, met with Herod, paid homage to Jesus, and were warned in a dream to go home by another way [2]. City-dwellers may neglect the stars, but in Shakespeare they can be foreboding or determine fate; one can be “star-crossed” ( Romeo and Juliet ), or out of another’s star (Ophelia/ Hamlet ), or one might guide a ship by them; Shakespeare mentions them more than 100 times (a sample): “Look, the unfolding star calls up the shepherd.” - Measure for Measure “That I should love a bright particular star” - All's Well That Ends Well “O eastern star!” - Antony and Cleopatra “Our Jovial star reign'd at his birth” - Cymbeline “When yond same star that's westward from the pole Had made his course t' illume that part of heaven Where now it burns…” - Hamlet      “I am constant as the northern star” - Julius Caesar In the gospel, and in sleepless dreams of...

While Ophelia and Hamlet are watching “The Mousetrap,” Hamlet is very talkative with running commentary for the court and especially for Claudius, whose conscience he hopes to catch as the players reenact something like the circumstances of King Hamlet’s poisoning.[1]  Ophelia says to Hamlet, “You are as good as a chorus, my lord.” (3.2.269) The chorus served in Greek plays in many ways, including to comment on the actions on and off stage, and to serve as the voice of fear or of conscience.[2] One way to read Ophelia’s statement is that she is simply describing what Hamlet is doing in the immediate context of the scene. But critics and scholars have always loved to explore how a line in a narrow context may apply to larger contexts. THOUGHT EXPERIMENT: What if Shakespeare uses Ophelia’s line to signal to audiences and readers that, in fact, one could read the whole play as if the very talkative Hamlet is a kind of chorus throughout, who sheds light on other characters, who at so...

If Hamlet is NOT a revenge tragedy, what is it? Peter Lake [1] shares his ideas on this topic and more in his 2020 book, Hamlet’s Choice: Religion and Resistance in Shakespeare's Revenge Tragedies .[2] Lake claims Hamlet is not *merely* a revenge tragedy, but much more, bending and mixing genres. If Hamlet is not *merely* a revenge tragedy, what is it? In a (Senecan, or heroic/Homeric) revenge tragedy like The Spanish Tragedy (1587, Thomas Kyd), injustices occur, and a victim of wrongs decides to take revenge. Eventually there’s a lot of plotting of violence, and the revenge is worse than the original injustice. Not in Hamlet, Lake observes. Shakespeare had already written the successful Titus Andronicus (1594), a more traditional revenge tragedy, which ends like The Spanish Tragedy, with the main character killing the heirs of the villains and cooking them, and then making the villains eat it. Yuck. Nothing like that happens in Hamlet. Lake observes: By the tim...