Paul Adrian Fried / HAMLET'S BIBLE

There are at least three major uses of ambiguity in Shakespeare. How we speak of it, and what we value about it, vary widely.  1. One popular use of ambiguity can be a “Rorschach Effect”: Many believe that this gives actors and audiences permission to imagine and interpret any meaning or motivation they wish about the lines [1].  Shakespeare, his playing company, and early audiences may not have been quite that relativistic [2], but it certainly helps playing companies today in new contexts, to adapt plays to changing circumstances.  2. A second kind of ambiguity might be a “Scheherazade Effect” [3]. If you live in times when many are executed for their opinions or religious allegiances, you might feel like Scheherazade, who had to entertain with stories to stay alive.  If you also wanted to catch the conscience of the monarch, you had to be careful, or there would be trouble [4]. Instead of being too confrontational, one had to be indirect [5]: One had to use storie...

CLAUDIUS UNNAMED: Why – at the end of the reign of Elizabeth I – would Shakespeare have characters in Hamlet be silent regarding the king’s name, in a play involving an “incestuous marriage” in which the king marries his older brother’s widow? Some things could not be named. In the minds of audiences, the incestuous marriage would seem uncomfortably close to the first marriage of Henry VIII. For similar reasons, Richard II could not include the deposition scene when first published [1], and Shakespeare’s collaboration with John Fletcher on Henry VIII was not written or enacted until 1613 [2]. Why? Censorship, fear, and tact. Everyone knew that - Henry VIII, Elizabeth’s father, had married his older brother’s widow, and later divorced her, claiming it an incestuous marriage… - and that Elizabeth was sometimes called a “bastard queen”: Henry and Anne Boleyn had conceived Elizabeth out of wedlock; Elizabeth was born only three months after a secret marriage, making her ineligible in th...

I love Grace Tiffany’s sonnet “Gertrude and Ophelia” [1] for now it reimagines Gertrude as having drowned Ophelia. The sonnet explores a possibility for Gertrude’s agency that the play chooses not to explore. Grace recently introduced the poem, tongue-in-cheek, as depicting “what really happened.” Other plays, films and novels make similar claims, exploring alternative versions from different points of view, including the 2018 film, Ophelia ; a 2022 novel by Carly Stevens called Laertes: A Hamlet Retelling; a 2008 novel by Paul Griffiths made from Ophelia’s words, Let Me Tell You ; and many more. [2] On female agency, there is a reading of Ophelia’s death that wrestles with Ophelia’s apparent lack of agency, proposing not despair, but that Ophelia uses suicide to fiercely reclaim her own agency. [3]  IRRECONCILABLE DIFFERENCES This reading is hard to reconcile with Grace Tiffany’s poem: Ophelia probably cannot be both a victim of murder at Gertrude’s hands, and *also* a suicide. ...