Paul Adrian Fried / HAMLET'S BIBLE

It is said that in Shakespeare’s plays, all resurrections are staged, faked: Much Ado About Nothing (Hero) [1]; Henry IV, Part 1 (Falstaff) [2]. Staging can fail badly: Romeo and Juliet [3] (as if to admit the limitations of such staging?). Poor Tom/Edgar stages a miracle for Gloucester in King Lear [4].   Sonnet 18 ends, “So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see, / So long lives this, and this gives life to thee,” as if the poem bestows (stages) everlasting life. What to make of this? As is said in Hamlet of Ophelia’s “mad” speech, many will “botch” these facts up “fit to their own thoughts” [5]: Atheists may claim this proves Shakespeare’s atheism. Christians may note: Miracle and Mystery Plays were banned by Henry VIII, still restricted in Elizabethan times. Even if Shakespeare wanted to portray resurrections, his hands were tied. Many of Hamlet’s verbal tricks with Claudius [6] and Polonius [7] (and Claudius again [8]) – and the gravedigger’s with Hamlet [8] – depend on ta...

From a 2023 post [1]: ...Balthazar (the dark-skinned magi of the evolving Epiphany tradition) became a kind of touchstone or symbol of otherness, diversity, and tolerance. And so it is also perhaps no surprise that the name Balthasar occurs five times in Shakespeare’s plays, twice as servants (in Romeo and Juliet, and in The Merchant of Venice), once as a singer in Much Ado About Nothing, once as a merchant in The Comedy of Errors, and once as a lawyer, Portia’s courtroom disguise in The Merchant of Venice, where she is called a "Daniel"; a play in which Portia considers suitors from many lands. Shakespeare also has a play named after the night before the Epiphany, Twelfth Night. The three Magi are outsiders, foreigners, and so are the siblings in Twelfth Night who are shipwrecked on the island of Illyria, the land of their enemies. But by the end of that play, the siblings both marry leading personages from Illyria, contributing to themes of diversity, tolerance, reconcili...

I am reposting some thoughts from Charlotte Scott, who extends some ideas of Julia Kristeva regarding the “ick” and the “abject”: [1] Charlotte writes, “Whilst the abject may be those things, fluids, forms, faeces that we ‘thrust aside in order to live’, (Kristeva) the ick is what we reject in order not to become.” Often we may fail to attend closely to the elements she identifies in Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing and Twelfth Night: We feel a cathartic effect as we view or read the plays, but at times we may become too familiar with them, or with scholarly theories that address them. But when people like Charlotte Scott draw attention to them like this, following a kind of golden thread (Blake) [2], we become defamiliarized (Viktor Shklovsky) enough to give it fresh attention. In Hamlet, Claudius, as murderer of his brother and usurper of the throne, would greatly prefer that Hamlet “thrust aside” his mourning “in order to live,” and Gertrude joins him in discouraging Hamlet’s m...

As with last year, I'm using the holidays to stray a bit from the topic of biblical allusions in Shakespeare's Hamlet. Besides my post about Hamlet Had an Uncle, I will be making a few other posts before twelfth night (the day before Epiphany), including a post about Shakespeare's  Twelfth Night. [image by Folger Shakespeare Library] Much Ado and the "Jade's Trick"— as coitus interruptus? I have been reading a good essay about Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing, an essay which argues that in many Shakespeare plays, men have more trouble with commitment than women. The essay is by Joost Daadler (2004, "The Pre-history of Beatrice and Benedick in 'Much Ado About Nothing'" . 'English Studies', vol.85, no.6, 520-527). https://dspace.flinders.edu.au/xmlui/bitstream/handle/2328/324/The%20Pre-History%20of%20Beatrice%20and%20Benedick%20in%20Much%20Ado%20About%20N.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y&fbclid=IwAR3aIjblrlkcRyM_F...