Paul Adrian Fried / HAMLET'S BIBLE

From a 2023 post [1]: ...Balthazar (the dark-skinned magi of the evolving Epiphany tradition) became a kind of touchstone or symbol of otherness, diversity, and tolerance. And so it is also perhaps no surprise that the name Balthasar occurs five times in Shakespeare’s plays, twice as servants (in Romeo and Juliet, and in The Merchant of Venice), once as a singer in Much Ado About Nothing, once as a merchant in The Comedy of Errors, and once as a lawyer, Portia’s courtroom disguise in The Merchant of Venice, where she is called a "Daniel"; a play in which Portia considers suitors from many lands. Shakespeare also has a play named after the night before the Epiphany, Twelfth Night. The three Magi are outsiders, foreigners, and so are the siblings in Twelfth Night who are shipwrecked on the island of Illyria, the land of their enemies. But by the end of that play, the siblings both marry leading personages from Illyria, contributing to themes of diversity, tolerance, reconcili...

"Bohemia and English literature? Everybody who sees this title will instantly think if Shakespeare's Winter's Tale and the sea-coast of Bohemia..." - RENÉ WELLEK [1] If Shakespeare critics mention one thing about Bohemia, it's that Shakespeare got the geography wrong: You can't get there by boat. For example, Susan Halstead writes , "This glaring geographical error – attributing a sea-shore to the landlocked territory of Bohemia – has frequently been cited as an instance of Shakespeare’s ignorance of Central European topography..." [2] But what if the thing we read and heard most often was that Bohemia was the land of Jan Hus, who advocated communion under both kinds (bread and wine), something very common today even in Roman Catholic parishes. Yet Jan Hus was burned at the stake for it. What if we heard that the ideas of Jan Hus influenced the "Confesio Bohemica" (Czech Confession), "the first ecumenical confession," and...