Paul Adrian Fried / HAMLET'S BIBLE

Depending on who is pope at the time – either the time of the writing of a Shakespeare play, or a during a given production, or work of scholarship – the way people feel about Hamlet’s Uncle Claudius and his various sins or vices may vary greatly.  Elizabeth I had been excommunicated by Pope Pius V (1570) [1]. Under Sixtus V, Rome encouraged Spain to launch three Armada invasions of England (1588, 1596, 1601). (How would you feel?) During the English Civil Wars (1642 to 1651), in part about religion, Pope Innocent X (1644-1655) supported Ireland, against objections of the exiled Henrietta Maria, English Queen living in Paris.  So before 1660, it was easier to connect Claudius and his sins and vices with Rome and a Catholic church that resisted reform.  Fast forward to the 1800s: Charles Dickens publishes Oliver Twist (1837-1839), A Christmas Carol (1843), and Hard Times (1854); Marx and Engles publish Das Kapital (1867-1894), and Pope Leo XIII publishes Rerum Novarum (1...

Love’s Labor’s Lost was Christmas entertainment (1593) for Elizabeth I and her court. It's about a bunch of guys who try to be celibate, and who keep a princess and her attending ladies locked out of their castle. The men fall in love with the women, but the women get the last word. Sort of like popes (some who failed at the celibacy thing) who excommunicated Elizabeth, keeping her out of the “castle” of the Roman Church, but never getting what they desired of her. Many scholars note that the character of King Ferdinand is based on King Henry III of Navarre, who had been raised Protestant, and who Elizabeth I had supported in French wars of religion. He converted to Catholicism (“Paris is worth a mass”) to consolidate his power as the next king of France, disappointing Elizabeth. Of the nine popes during Elizabeth’s reign,* one of them, Gregory XIII (1572-85), had a child out of wedlock (like Armado and Jaquenetta in the play) before his ordination. In their oaths and the...