Paul Adrian Fried / HAMLET'S BIBLE

IF I WON THE LOTTERY, like Babette in the film, “Babette’s Feast,” [1] I would love to travel the world, see places I’ve never been, places with “strange sounding names” [2] (strange to me, anyway…). And if I could, it would be wonderful to travel to the many places where all my LinkedIn friends and connections live, and visit over lunch or coffee, and hear the sounds of your voices! But short of that, for now, if you’ve wondered what my voice sounds like when I’m not doing an imitation of the cartoon character “Goofy” [3], you can hear my voice in the Mother’s Day panel discussion organized by Rodney Hakim and New York Shakespeare, exploring mothers in Shakespeare with Pauline Kiernan and Royston Coppenger: The video is now available in two parts at YouTube: Part 1: https://youtu.be/THvwuGYKQcA Part 2: https://youtu.be/7-g43NcarOM For those interested in the topic of mothers in Shakespeare, there are many things that have been written for popular as well as scholarly audiences. Here a...

Shakespeare was a thief of plot elements and tropes, like other playwrights of his time. Given that the original tale on which Hamlet is based doesn’t include a poison cup from a step-parent, secretly intended for the prince, but taken instead by the queen, where might that have come from? What uses of such a trope might have inspired Shakespeare? [1] Shakespeare was familiar with Ovid’s Metamorphosis from Latin school and from Arthur Golding’s 1567 translation. This included tales of Medea in Book VII. These include a story about a poison cup that Medea intends for her stepson Theseus, but which is knocked from his hand at the last moment by his father, king Aegeus, who recognizes his son. This may have informed Shakespeare’s use of the poison cup theme in Hamlet. But Shakespeare switches the roles of the step-mother-poisoner and the father-savior so that it’s the stepfather Claudius who intends to poison his stepson, and the mother, Gertrude, who buys her son time by drinking...