Paul Adrian Fried / HAMLET'S BIBLE

[My previous post said that the next four would explore four different interpretations of Gertrude; this post explores the first of those interpretations in greater detail, an allegorical reading.] One of my least favorite interpretations of Gertrude in Shakespeare’s Hamlet is when people read her merely as a Protestant allegory for the corrupt Catholic church. In this reading, Gertrude (like the Roman church) is a slave to her passions; she cannot resist either her lust for Claudius or her desire for wine.[1] Many readers and playgoers today are too removed from Protestant-Catholic debates and propaganda in Shakespeare’s time, so to suggest this allegory often elicits only confusion. In the Bible, in Revelations 17, Protestants found an analogy for corruption in the Roman Catholic church, comparing it to a fallen woman selling favors, worshiping idols of pleasure instead of the “one true God.” It helps to know that Shakespeare and most everyone in England and on the continent were exp...

[This is a re-posting of a post that would not post on LinkedIn, perhaps because of the word "Whore" in the original title - ?] Does it matter that Hamlet says to his mother, "when you are desirous to be blest, I’ll blessing beg of you" (3.4.192-3)? Some Shakespeare critics think that Gertrude in Shakespeare’s Hamlet is damned, and that she stands for the Book of Revelation’s "Whore of Babylon," which to Catholics represented worldliness (Augustine’s City of Man, as compared to the City of God), and to Protestants a way of viewing a corrupt Catholic Church. [1] This may be an example of critics "botch[ing] the words up fit to their own thoughts" as Horatio says (4.5.12).[2] Is Gertrude really the "whore of Babylon," and doomed to hell? I don't think so: - She keeps Hamlet's secret from Claudius, and shows compassion to Ophelia, though reluctant at first, at Horatio's urging (yes, Horatio urges her, more for polit...

When Hamlet tells Polonius he is a "fishmonger" (which many read as also meaning "flesh-monger" or pimp), and later associates Polonius with Jephthah (son of a harlot or prostitute), we might paraphrase the title of the Tina Turner song, "What's Love Got to Do With It?" In our case, we might ask: What's prostitution got to do with it? At least one way of viewing prostitution is that it takes what may be at best relationships of mutual and reciprocal gift-giving, and corrupts them by reducing them to market transactions, this-for-that, without nurturing ongoing and transcendent bonds on which communities depend if they are to have a future. Some may view this reading of prostitution as moralistic and oppressive, as if to assert that sex belongs only in marriage, and that perhaps all transactions of the marketplace are evil, whereas only gift-exchange that builds community is good. That is not my objective here, as I hope will become more clea...

This is an 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. [Clockwise from upper left: Glenn Close as Gertrude, 1990 (with Mel Gibson as Hamlet), directed by Franco Zeffirelli; Eileen Herlie as Gertrude, 1948 (with Lawrence Olivier as Hamlet), directed by Laurence Olivier (Herlie also played Gertrude in the 1964 production of Hamlet starring Richard Burton, directed by Bill Colleran & John Gielgud); Diane Venora as Gertrude, 2000 (with Ethan Hawke as Hamlet), directed by Michael Almereyda; Julie Christie as Gertrude, 1996 (with Kenneth Branagh as Hamlet), directed by Kenneth Branagh.] ~~...