Paul Adrian Fried / HAMLET'S BIBLE

Echoes of Maundy Thursday in Hamlet (and Hobbits): [Image: Screen capture from YouTube clip of The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003), directed by Peter Jackson, Warner Bros. based on the book by J.R.R. Tolkien. Fair use.] [UPDATED 26 March, 2026] Maundy Thursday (or Holy Thursday, 2 April, 2026) begins what the Catholic Church calls the Triduum (Paschal or Easter Triduum).  “Maundy” comes from the Latin word for “command,” so Maundy Thursday gets its name from the Latin words once used at the opening of the Thursday service during Holy Week, and the gospel in which Jesus commands his disciples to love and serve others as he loved and served them.  It includes a ritual remembrance of Jesus washing the disciples’ feet  (John 13:1–17), with Jesus “New Commandment” to love and serve, an idea used by (sometimes antisemitic) Christians to differentiate from the Ten Commandments of Moses. [1] There are echoes of this in Hamlet 1.2, when Horatio enters, he has t...

"Shakespeare quotes the Bible roughly 1,350 times, considerably more than any other playwright of the period. Ignoring religion when discussing his work is a bit like ignoring an elephant sitting on your sofa sipping a martini." - John R. Yamamoto-Wilson (from an online comment on a post here ) From Hamlet's Choice: Hamlet—A Reformation Allegory , by Linda Kay Hoff (1990): Hamlet is a play in which religious elements loom large. As such it has attracted an inordinate number of Catholic and Protestant apologist critics who, more than any other, "botch the words up fit to their own thought" * in trying to make of Hamlet a religious drama compatible with the preconceived religious beliefs that moved them to respond to the religious elements within Hamlet in the first place, usually with the transparent ulterior motive of aligning Shakespeare with themselves as their coreligionist. While many of these apologist critics have contributed useful explanations...