Paul Adrian Fried / HAMLET'S BIBLE

If we think the main reason that Shakespeare named Hamlet’s uncle “Claudius” was because it was the English Renaissance – so things associated with ancient Rome were fashionable – we might miss the main point [1].  To have Claudius be a murderous, usurping, incestuous, unrepentant sinner, and to have Hamlet mention Nero [2], reveals a great deal about religious-political assumptions of Shakespeare’s time. Claudius is in fact like the Rome of Protestant polemics: MURDEROUS, POISONING, CONSPIRING, UNREPENTANT: Catholic Rome was viewed as corrupt and unrepentantly sinful, resisting reform. Rome excommunicated Elizabeth I (1570, 1588) [3]; English Catholics made numerous efforts to assassinate her [4]. Reformers associated the Mass with poison [5]; scholars call the poison cup of Claudius a “black Mass” [6]. INCESTUOUS: Rome had approved the “incestuous marriage” of Henry VIII to his brother’s widow, and if Elizabeth had accepted the marriage proposal of her brother-in-law Philip II of...

This is part 10 in a series on the allusion in Hamlet 1.5 to the beggar Lazarus in Luke 16. Previous posts have considered aspects of leprosy in England ("Lazar-houses,"), the legal status of beggars and vagabonds, and some aspects of the historical context of the Biblical tale in its original context. For an index of posts in this series, see the end of this post. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ SOMETIMES, part of the fun of research is what one finds by accident in the process of looking for other things. This was the case in my search for the official homilies of Cranmer and Jewell mentioning beggar Lazarus of Luke 16, alluded to by the ghost in Hamlet 1.5. There are three such homilies. This blog post contains my annotations for the first, “An Exhortation Against the Fear of Death.” We cannot travel back in time and experience what it might have been like to attend Shakespeare's Hamlet at the Globe, and then attend church and hear sermons of Cranmer a...