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...

Marjorie Garber of Harvard University thinks the drinking games of Claudius, with cannon fire and “earthly thunder,” are possibly blasphemous, adding yet another sin to his list. Claudius breaks a number of the Ten Commandments: Thou shalt not kill (Deuteronomy 5:17, Genesis 4:3-15) [1], nor covet thy neighbor’s house or wife (etc.) (Exodus 20:17) [2], nor bear false witness (Exodus 20:16) [3]. But more essentially, Claudius breaks the first commandment, which is to love God and have no other gods (Exodus 20:3-5). Garber notes the blasphemy implied in his drinking game: No jocund health that Denmark drinks today But the great cannon to the clouds shall tell, And the King’s rouse the heaven shall bruit again, Respeaking earthly thunder. (1.2.129-132) Garber writes, “It even approaches blasphemy, when we hear [...] that every time the King drinks, the cannons will blaze away, and ‘The King’s Rouse the heavens shall bruit again, / respeaking earthly thunder’.... Properly, thunder is heave...

PRECEDENTS FOR HAMLET PLOT ELEMENTS—AND A VILLAIN NAMED CLAUDIUS— IN ARTHURIAN LEGENDS: One of the villains in the Arthurian legends is named Claudas, a variant of Claudius, the main villain in Shakespeare’s Hamlet . But in fact, the Arthurian legends contain many of the essential plot elements of Hamlet . Instead of “All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten,” we could say, many of the things Shakespeare and Saxo Grammaticus needed to know to write Hamlet , they could have learned from the Arthurian legends: - The ghost of a parent [1] and warrior [2]; - a prince (or king) who relates to soldiers and close friends as equals [3]; - questions of marital infidelity [4] and of broken marriage promises [5]; - knightly codes of honor and violence that conflict at times with courtesy and Christian values [6] - suicidal, love-forsaken women [7]; - the living body or dead corpse of a heartbroken woman, floating in a river or stream [8]; - contrast between characters who interpret ...