Paul Adrian Fried / HAMLET'S BIBLE

In 2019, Shakespeare Magazine from the UK published a short piece called, " All Crowns are Hollow: The scheming and backstabbing politicians of today would do well to ponder the fate of Shakespeare’s Kings ." [Image from The Hollow Crown , British TV series, via Wikipedia . Fair use.] The piece includes the observation, "Very few of the kings in Shakespeare ever get to do any actual ‘kinging’. Instead they fight tooth and nail to get to the throne – often committing heinous crimes like murder in the process – and then they die." While the title of this piece points to some usefulness for "scheming and backstabbing politicians of today," we might also consider how Shakespeare's plays reflect the playwright's (and his time's?) attitudes and skepticism about monarchs. Many of Shakespeare's monarchs are shown in a bad light: - Macbeth... - Richard II is a poor king, deposed. - Henry IV: The Biblical King David did not want to kill...

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...