The relationship between Hamlet and the Bible. It may seem that anything can be distorted into a typological pattern. Such interpretations seem to suffer from the structuralist errors of skating too lightly on actual texts, ignoring details that cannot be forced into a preconceived mold, and robbing narratives of their concrete forms through abstraction. I would like to point out that there is much more to Shakespeare than just typology, but I would also like to insist that typology is often an important part of his drama. To make this claim plausible, however, more detailed attention to the text of his plays is needed. In what follows, I will draw attention to the textual and dramatic details that justify a typological reading of Hamlet. Claudius's murder of King Hamlet, the act that catalyzes the play's drama, is presented as a sin of primordial character and cosmic implications. Claudius confesses that his fratricide parallels Abel's murder: Oh, my offense is vulgar, it stinks to high heaven; he carries the oldest curse, the murder of a brother (3.3.36-38). Hamlet's description of his psychological condition at the beginning of the play brings the imagery back to the beginning of the biblical story:How tired, stale, flat, and unprofitable all the uses of this world seem to me! Shame! Oh shame! It is a weedless garden, growing to produce seeds; gross and gross things in nature simply possess it (1.2.135-37). Claudius not only committed fratricide, but regicide. Since the king is peculiarly the image of God, regicide is a sort of deicide. At the very least, it is an act of rebellion against divine authority. Claudius is therefore not just Cain but Adam.(7) Claudius' sin has, at least for Hamlet, transformed Denma... into the center of the card... identical to all the other rings." (A Theater of Envy, p. 273).Works Cited Erlich, Avi. 1977. Hamlet's Absent Father. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 70- 109. Fleissner, Robert 1982. '"Sullied" Or "Solid": Hamlet's Flesh Once More.' Hamlet Studies 4:92-3. Fowler, Alastair 1987. "The plays within the play of Hamlet." In Opinions Fanned and Sifted: Shakespearean Essays Presented to Harold Jenkins, edited by John W. Mahon and Thomas A Pendleton London and New York: Methuen.Freud, Sigmund 1953-74 24 vols, trans. James Stachey, London: Hogarth.