Paul Adrian Fried / HAMLET'S BIBLE

Hamlet is in part about a contested succession, a hot topic in Elizabethan England. The first line in Hamlet, “Who’s there?” sounds like “who’s th’ heir?” [1]. Hamlet believes Claudius is a murderous usurper, an illegitimate successor to his father. Contested succession applies not only to politics, but also to religion in Shakespeare’s time and Christianity in general, and to scientific authority as well. At least some people in Shakespeare’s time would have noticed that the story of Jesus is one of contested succession in which Jesus is heaven’s prince [2]. After the Roman occupation in 63 BCE, Jewish authorities were corrupted in Rome’s favor [3]. Some of these used the letter of the law to condemn the preacher and miracle-worker, Jesus, who like John the Baptist had attracted the attention and concern of Roman authorities. The gospels claim that Jesus associated with revolutionaries (zealots), and that he was crucified with a sign that mocked him as “King of the Jews.” [4] After ...

Some might think I missed a comma and that this post is about three people: Hamlet, his uncle Claudius, and Ptolemy, the astronomer. But in fact, the astronomer was a Roman citizen with “Claudius” as part of his name. What does this have to do with Shakespeare’s Danish tragedy? Ptolemy (circa 100 – 170 AD) was on the wrong side of science from an Elizabethan point of view. He thought that the earth was at the center, and that the sun and other heavenly objects went around the earth. About 350 years before Ptolemy, Aristarchus of Samos (310 – 230 BC) had said that the sun was at the center, but that idea didn’t catch on until the likes of Copernicus (1473 – 1543) and others. Certain passages in the Bible claimed that the sun moved, so the church was slow to endorse the Copernican paradigm. When Polonius reads Hamlet’s love letter to Ophelia, it includes the lines, Doubt thou the stars are fire; Doubt that the sun doth move; Doubt truth to be a liar; But never doubt I love. (2.2.124-12...

On Instagram, botanicalshakespeare (whose posts I love) reminds us recently of the change in calendar required by Pope Gregory XIII in 1582, which meant that on what would have been October 5, continental Europe leaped ahead by 10 days, making it, instead, October 15. Shakespeare may have had this in mind (among many other things, like incest, usurpation, murder and corruption) when he decided to have Hamlet say, “The time is out of joint” (1.5) botanicalshakespeare notes: "…or at least it was in 1582 when the pontifical states switched calendars -from Julian to Gregorian (not Gregory I of chanting fame, this is Pope Gregory XIII) - and skipped ahead 10 days… but England decided to keep those extra days for a while 😉 — till 1752!" This might be fodder for some who insist that Shakespeare was Catholic, and who might claim that a Catholic Shakespeare may have supported the "fixing" of an out-of-joint time by making Protestant England Catholic again. But in fact, th...

SCIENCE INFLUENCED & RESTRICTED ANALYSIS OF BIBLICAL ALLUSIONS IN SHAKESPEARE'S PLAYS — AND INFLUENCED THE PLAYS AS WELL The long shadow of science had a restrictive influence on Shakespeare critics who tried to catalog biblical allusions in his plays: Perhaps caught up in enthusiasm for the scientific method, some literary scholars rejected what they viewed as too-subjective biblical allusions and influences (paraphrase and plot echo), and favored instead what seemed to them more like objective data: allusions that contained exact or nearly-exact bible quotes that could be matched with bible translations available at the time: See books by Charles Wordsworth (1864), Thomas Carter (1905), Richmond Noble (1935), and Naseeb Shaheem (1987-1999). Yet in “Truth and Method,” his famous book on interpretation/hermeneutics, Hans Georg Gadamer stressed that the arts and scholars of the arts should not feel obligated to conform to so-called scientific methods. I agree. Also, Natal...