Paul Adrian Fried / HAMLET'S BIBLE

In Hamlet , why is “Mary” spelled “Marry”? The spelling helped to obscure the “minced oath” invoking the name of St. Mary, mother of Jesus [1], breaking the Third Commandment, not to take the name of God (and other holy persons and things) in vain [2]. In performance, audiences would hear “Mary,” but to get the play approved for performance in the first place, the players would submit the ("Marry"-spelling) script to the Master of Revels for approval or changes.  For publication, Elizabethan censors could also approve a text or require changes. “Marry” is interesting for many reasons: The allusion is to Mary, mother of Jesus. Joseph almost didn’t “Marry” her: He learned she had become pregnant before their marriage and considered quietly calling it off, but after a vision in a dream, he married her anyway. The play is about a resentful, vengeful ghost who thinks his wife should have been faithful, even after death (1.5). It’s also about an “incestuous” marriage of a...

On the 6th day of Christmas (December 30) if Shakespeare attended church for morning or evening prayer, what Bible passages would he have heard? MORNING: Psalm 30 - The House of David [1]. Isaiah 63 - A vengeful God [2]. Acts 27 - Paul shipwrecked.* EVENING: Isaiah 64 - Divine intervention [3]? 3 John 1 - Welcome strangers [4]? “Demetrius” [5]? * Acts 27 is about St. Paul and a shipwreck, reminding us of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night , but also of the Shakespeare collaboration, 𝘗𝘦𝘳𝘪𝘤𝘭𝘦𝘴, which echoes the geography of Paul’s travels. Hannibal Hamlin refers to the play as “The Acts of 𝘗𝘦𝘳𝘪𝘤𝘭𝘦𝘴” for all of its resemblances to Paul’s journeys [6]. After Paul’s shipwreck, Roman soldiers at first want to execute all prisoners so they don’t escape, but one wants Paul to be spared, an act of mercy. Paul argues that they can all swim to shore: Paul takes the gift of the soldier’s mercy and expands it to include all of the prisoners, not just himself (like a figurative multiplica...

WHAT DOES IT MEAN for Elizabethan England, and for its queen and head of England’s church, that Shakespeare’s Hamlet portrays a queen defending Ophelia’s death as not of her own choosing, but fearless and accepted in faith? The play portrays two main attitudes about suicide: Christianity condemned it, while “antique Romans” embraced it as an option for honorable death. Hamlet prevents Horatio from drinking poison [1]; some scholars and productions have proposed that Hamlet offers Claudius the poison cup, and he takes it of his own volition.[2] The play presents gravediggers [3] and a “churlish priest” [4] who assume Ophelia killed herself; before these, no eyewitness accounts, but a queen who asks all to believe that Ophelia’s fall into the brook was not of her own choosing (but due to the crown-envy of a sliver of willow, like the crown envy of Claudius), and that Ophelia accepted her approaching death fearlessly, and in faith. Significantly, this play was written at the end of Eli...

Shakespeare’s Hamlet begins with Horatio acting like a doubting Thomas [1], not believing in ghosts, converted to belief after witnessing a ghost first-hand. But unmentioned is the lesson Jesus gives in John’s gospel after Thomas comes to belief: “...blessed are they that have not seen, and have believed.” [Jn 20:29] Are we invited to wait for this other shoe to drop? Shakespeare constructed his play so that Ophelia’s death, and Gertrude’s account of it, requires of all a leap of faith: Not seeing, but believing. Gertrude describes it not as a death in despair, but in charity (generously bestowing crowns) [2] and in faith (chanting sacred hymns) [3] after falling in the brook by accident, not intent.[4] In Gertrude’s account, Ophelia floats toward her death without struggle, as if to accept the risk of her own death in faith, like Hamlet: “Let be.”[5] We have not seen her death, yet we are invited to believe. The play invites cognitive dissonance between the expected damnation of sui...

In Hamlet , the prince says that, compared to his Uncle Claudius, his dead father was “So excellent a king, that was to this Hyperion to a satyr” (1.2.143-4). [1] He compares his father to Hyperion and three other pagan gods (Jove, Mars, Mercury) with his mother in the closet scene. (3.4.66-8) What are the implications of comparing his father, the dead king, to Hyperion? Are some of the implications affirmed by another allusion, to the skin-sores of the beggar Lazarus? In The Odyssey, against his advice, Odysseus' men kill and eat the cattle of Hyperion/Helios. [2] The fact that they’re hungry sailors on a long journey home doesn’t matter so much to Hyperion as their disrespect. Are they not like bread-stealing Jean Valjean in Victor Hugo's Les Misérables, starving, to be pitied? [3] Hyperion seems ungenerous, greedy, unmerciful toward the hungry sailors. As punishment, they never make it home. Consider: Hyperion and the sailors resemble the Rich Man and L...