Paul Adrian Fried / HAMLET'S BIBLE

Next week I will be part of a seminar at a conference: the annual meeting of the Shakespeare Association of America, which will be held this year in Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA.[1] I’ve attended before: 2018: I attended the 2018 meeting in Los Angeles, California, where I met Gayle Gaskill, editor of the New Kitteridge edition of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, as well as other scholars, young and old, with interesting tales to tell.[2] Gayle and I went on to present papers at the SCSC conference in the fall of 2018.[3] 2020: I was part of a seminar on “Mind, Cognition, and Affect” in 2020,[4] held on Zoom due to the pandemic. My paper was about labors of gratitude and regret in Hamlet, exploring how these emotions were instrumental in character arcs. See my series on that topic. [5] 2023: This year, I am taking part in the seminar, “Reconsidering Science and Religion,” on Thursday, 30 March, 3:30 to 5:30 p.m. CST. My paper is called “Kuhnian Paradigm Shifts and Emmaus Untet...

Usually when summer begins, views to my blog fall off as students and instructors take a break at the end of the spring term. But unexpectedly, in a 12-hour period this past day, I had 640 views of one of my blog posts from October of 2019 called " Gertrude as Recipient and Source of Gifts ." This was part 9 in a multi-part series on "Labors of Gratitude and Regret in Hamlet exploring how interactions between characters either offered (non-material) gifts that might inspire them to change, or how interactions sometimes moved characters to regret and change. (If you have not yet read that post, please feel free to visit the blog and give it a read at this link: https://pauladrianfried.blogspot.com/2019/10/gertrude-as-recipient-giver-of-gifts.html Here is a screen shot of the increased views over the last 24 hours associated with that post: When there is a surge in views like that, it might be caused by an instructor who teaches multiple sections of a class whose s...

SAA Seminar-by-Zoom This past Saturday (13 June) I participated in a Zoom meeting for the seminar, “Shakespeare and the Mind: Cognition, Emotion, Affect,” which had been postponed due to COVID-19 and the demands it created for those switching to online instruction. The seminar was for the 2020 conference of the Shakespeare Association of America, which had been scheduled for 15-18 April 2020 in Denver, Colorado, but the in-person element of the conference had been canceled because of the pandemic. Many of the events met over Zoom, and some posted these on social media for others to audit, but this was a bonus not in the original job description for seminar and workshop leaders (no one expected last June that there would be a pandemic, so familiarity with Zoom or other online conferencing platforms was not a requirement, and doing the extra work of managing auditors was also not expected, understandably, but it was unfortunate to miss out on so many of the conference events). Sem...

This is the latest installment in a multi-part series examining how characters interact in Hamlet, offering opportunities, gifts, planting seeds for future inspiration, or for changes of heart & mind. It follows ideas from Lewis Hyde (“The Labor of Gratitude,” a chapter in his book, The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property) . For more notes on the series and an index of previous posts in this series, see the end of this post. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ [Rufus Sewell as Fortinbras in Hamlet , directed by Kenneth Branagh (1996] Does Fortinbras Benefit from Gratitude or Regret (or is he more a cipher for James VI & I)? (part 13, Labors of Gratitude & Regret in Hamlet ) ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Postscript: Also see my post from a year and two months later than this one, regarding Fortinbras as a remarkable Jephthah figure, if one pays attention to the details of the biblical Jephthah tale: https://pauladrianfried.b...

This is the latest installment in a multi-part series examining how characters interact in Hamlet, offering opportunities, gifts, planting seeds for future inspiration, or for changes of heart & mind. It follows ideas from Lewis Hyde (“The Labor of Gratitude,” a chapter in his book, The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property) . For more notes on the series and an index of previous posts in this series, see the end of this post. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ What do we find if we view Claudius through Lewis Hyde’s lens of gift exchange dynamics? Hyde shows how people receive gifts, and when awakened to the gift’s potential, they may respond in gratitude and labor to become like the gift or the giver. This is a transformative process that may yield dynamic characters who evolve through their interactions rather than remaining static and unchanged, or in terms Christians may have used in Shakespeare's time, remaining proud, stubborn, and hard-hearte...