Paul Adrian Fried / HAMLET'S BIBLE

Shakespeare’s Hamlet can be read as offering not mere variations, but transformations of suicide [1]: After Hamlet wishes that God had not made laws against suicide, he later feels called by heaven and hell to avenge his father’s death [2], a kind of suicide mission. If he kills Claudius as God’s vengeful scourge [3], Hamlet may be hell-bound. He later realizes: it may be more damnable not to kill him, and for Claudius to cause Denmark further harm [4]; Hamlet may not survive, but his death might be transformed by a higher purpose. Ophelia’s is the first alleged suicide, in 4.7, transformed by her own madness in 4.5 [5] and by Gertrude’s account in three ways: 1. She says it was caused by the breaking of an “envious sliver” of willow [6], envious that it had no crowns like other willow branches (envious, like Claudius of his brother’s crown and wife). 2. Gertrude implies that, in the water, Ophelia seemed to surrender to the unfolding will of God [7]. 3. Her account may be...

Shakespeare’s Hamlet is radical in a religious sense. Shakespeare hints that Ophelia, Gertrude, and Hamlet—apparently damned for different reasons—are not only saved, but in fact are Christ-figures [1]. The texts support such a reading. Yet even if Shakespeare uses religion mostly for dramatic (not religious)  purposes [2], it is safe to say that a majority of scholars today might reject this idea, or at least be quite disinterested in it. Ophelia is apparently damned as a suicide [3], but Gertrude blames her death in part on an “envious sliver” of willow [4], envious — like Claudius — that it didn’t get a crown. Ophelia was generous in bestowing crowns (coronets) [5], like Christian scriptures which claim that all people can be adopted sons and daughters of God, and can inherit a heavenly crown [6]. Gertrude is apparently damned for her “incestuous marriage” to her dead husband’s brother [7], scandalous and forbidden, especially after the divorce of Henry VIII from his first wife ...