J.M. Ivo Klaver’s Blog

“All I require of my readers […] is that they approach my discussion of Shakespeare’s plays with an open mind and without preconception. […] All that is required of readers is, I would say, what Coleridge calls a ‘willing suspension of disbelief’ “. (Peter Milward, Shakespeare the Papist, 2005)

In the mid-1970s Milward published Shakespeare’s Religious Background, a controversial book in which he worked out the thesis of a Catholic Shakespeare he had been developing for over a decade.  In 1985 Honigmann acknowledged that Milward was the first “to recognize how all the ‘Lancashire’ clues in Shakespeare’s biography support one another” (Honigmann, Shakespeare: The ‘Lost’ Years).

There are lots of provocative titbits in Marvin Hunt’s book. Here’s another one: “To find Hamlet, we must look to mental illness” (p.125).

“The play Hamlet and the character Hamlet are in profound ways attempts to exorcise the supremely painful experience of the death of a son.” (Marvin Hunt, Looking for Hamlet, p.88)

Marvin Hunt writes in his Looking for Hamlet (2007) that “William Shakespeare’s Hamlet is an unlikely masterpiece – crowded, ungainly, gratuitous, and impossibly long, more than twice the typical length of a play from the period. Uncut, it runs more than four hours on the stage”.