Part of the Lord’s Prayer in MATTHEW 6 : 9-13 is “…lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil…” Claudius contemplates prayer as a way to be delivered from the evil of his own making, but finds he cannot because his will to sin is stronger than his desire to turn away from it in order to seek forgiveness…
Herod
MATTHEW 2 : 1-18 records Herod the Great as the insecure king who, upon hearing of Jesus’ birth, sent the wise men to search for the child, bring back word so that he could “come and worship Him also” (Matthew 2 : 8).
Doomsday
Horatio likens the ghost’s appearance to bad omens that predicated the assassination of Julius Caesar: “…the moist star / Upon whose influence Neptune’s empire stands / Was sick almost to doomsday with eclipse” (I, i). The event the Bible refers to as the day of judgment (MATTHEW 10 : 15) and the judgment seat of Christ (ROMANS 14 : 10)
Empty Graves
There exists striking parallels between the imagery of EZEKIEL 37 : 12-13, MATTHEW 27 : 52-53 and Horatio’s observation (I, i) that, “A little ere the mightiest Julius fell, / The graves stood tenantless and the sheeted dead / Did squeak and gibber in the Roman streets…” All three passages speak of graves being opened and their inhabitants coming out or being brought out.
Hypocrisy
MATTHEW 7 : 4 records Jesus confronting hypocritical hearts by asking “…how wilt thou say to thy brother, ‘Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye’; and, behold, a beam is in thine own eye?” The “mote” of Elizabethan English is a speck or a small particle of something. Shakespeare employs the word and the allusion…