Paul Adrian Fried / HAMLET'S BIBLE

With, hoo! such bugs and goblins in my life... - Hamlet 5.2.25 [1] This is my favorite Halloween-themed line in Hamlet, from the last scene, at the start of which Hamlet describes to Horatio how he discovered the letter with orders from Claudius for England to execute Hamlet (by beheading) upon their ship's arrival there. Frightening stuff! In many places around the world, some people will observe Halloween, the evening of 31 October, "All Hallows Eve," with its roots in Christian tradition of celebrating All Souls this day, and anticipating the Feast of All Saints tomorrow, November 1. It is harvest time, and so we also consider death as a harvest of souls. It is a good time of year for such stuff, with cold weather, and with leaves changing color in the Northern Hemisphere approaching winter. Hamlet famously converses with an apparition that claims to be the ghost of his father, after the apparition had been previously seen a number of times by sentinels, finall...

If you ask people to identify the six most famous words from Hamlet, most might reply, "To be or not to be" (from Act 3, scene 1), but a close contender would probably be, "Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him" from Act 5, scene 1. [Nicholas Cage in Prisoners of the Ghostland, 2021, directed by Sion Sono. Screen capture image (cropped) from YouTube. Fair use.] In a 2021 horror film, Prisoners of the Ghostland (which received many negative reviews), Nicholas Cage, in the starring role, has a brief Hamlet moment in which he is given a beat-up football helmet from a pile of junk, and he addresses it the way that Prince Hamlet addressed the skull of his beloved court jester in the graveyard in 5.1. You can view the 17-second clip from Youtube at this link < https://youtu.be/FbPZC8V8TnE > or here: What about "Alas, poor Henry VIII! I knew him!"? Earlier this week (on June 28 and June 30), I did two posts related to the allegedly "incest...