About

Hannibal Hamlin is a professor in the Department of English at The Ohio State University, with expertise in Renaissance literature, particularly the Bible and its influence on authors including Shakespeare, Philip and Mary Sidney, Donne, Herbert, Milton, and Bunyan. His work focuses on the Psalms and their early modern translation into poetic meters and literary forms, exploring aspects of allusion and intertextuality in biblical and poetic contexts. Hamlin has received several fellowships, including a Frederick Burkhardt Residential Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies, a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship at the Folger Shakespeare Library, and a Francis Bacon Foundation Fellowship at the Huntington Library. He co-curated the exhibition 'Manifold Greatness: The Creation and Afterlife of the King James Bible' at the Folger Shakespeare Library and has served as editor of the journal Reformation. His current projects include an anthology titled 'The Psalms in English, 1530-1633,' a collection on Shakespeare and Narrative Theory, and a study on allusion and intertextuality in cultural contexts.

Research topics

• Literature
• Philosophy
• Art
• Sociology
• Political Science
• Theology
• Linguistics
• Art history
• Law
• Classics

Selected publications

• Symposium: David Ferry and the Play of Allusion

  Literary Imagination · 2025-01-01

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• Raising the Dead: Robert Southwell, Biblical Poetics, and Prosopopoeia

  2024-01-01

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  Early modern biblical poetics, as manifested in the seventeenth-century religious lyric, was a Protestant poetics, so Barbara Lewalski argued over half a century ago.Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 19

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• Kim Paffenroth, On King Lear, The Confessions, and Human Experience and Nature

  Augustinian Studies · 2023

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  • Philosophy
  • Theology
  • Literature
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• Paul Griffiths's let me tell you, Hamlet , and the Intertextual Mode of Literary Adaptation

  Comparative drama · 2023-06-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Paul Griffiths's let me tell you, Hamlet, and the Intertextual Mode of Literary Adaptation Hannibal Hamlin (bio) Paul Griffths's let me tell you (2008) is a novel written in the first person, in the voice of Ophelia, using only those words assigned to her in Shakespeare's Hamlet. This formal conceit qualifies the work as Oulipian, as most reviewers have noted, though Griffiths has no specific connection with "OuLiPo" (Ouvroir de litérature potentielle), the group founded in 1960 by Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais to promote bravura experiments in constricting literary forms.1 Among the most famous works produced by the group are Georges Perec's A Void (La disparation), a 300-page novel that does not use the letter e, and Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities (Le città invisibili), a collection of descriptions of fifty-five cities in eleven thematic categories that follows a complex mathematical pattern. Although Queneau described the group sardonically as "rats who construct the labyrinth from which they plan to escape," its founding principle is no different than that of any artist who chooses to work in a fixed or constraining form. It is the challenge of creating within constraints that stimulates the imagination (the rat) and, perhaps, results in an enhanced work of art (the escape). Poets writing sestinas or numerological poems, and composers fashioning music based on the golden ratio or the ragas of Indian classical music, have for centuries been Oulipians avant la lettre. What distinguishes Griffiths's novel from many Oulipian experiments, however, is that his conceit is not arbitrarily self-imposed but essential to [End Page 57] what he is trying to tell us. Some Oulipian forms result in almost Dadaist nonsense, like those following the pattern "N + 7," taking an existing piece of writing and replacing every noun in it with the seventh noun following it in a dictionary. In let me tell you, while Griffiths struggles to make meaning with a vocabulary of only 483 words, his struggle mirrors Ophelia's to find the words to tell her story; she is aware, on some level, that the words she speaks are not her own, and that finding the right words is a challenge that may be beyond her. In some ways, her dilemma is a peculiar version of David Copperfield's, who wonders at the beginning of his narrative "whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by another."2 Like Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, moreover, Ophelia is already, as everyone knows, a supporting player in the story of Hamlet. Stoppard's characters cannot finally escape the parts that have been written for them (either by Shakespeare or Stoppard), but Griffiths's Ophelia, remarkably, may end up choosing a different path than was set down for her. The mind-bending irony is that if she does achieve this, she is still doing it in Shakespeare's language, which is perhaps itself a commentary on the intricate interrelationship of formal constraint and imaginative originality at the heart of Oulipo.3 ________ let me tell you is in some sense a prequel to Hamlet, in that the events Ophelia describes seem to take place before the beginning of Shakespeare's plot. She describes her childhood with her father, mother, brother, and a maid to whom she is especially close. Polonius and Laertes are familiar from Hamlet, though neither can be named, since Ophelia does not speak their names in the play. She doesn't speak her own name either, so Griffiths gives her a family nickname, "O."4 Shakespeare makes no mention of her mother, so Griffiths could have given her a name (Rosemary?), but to maintain the same sense of distance and abstraction, perhaps, O usually calls her "she" or "her" (her brother calls her May-May at one point, but this sounds like a childhood nickname). O's narrative also includes [King Hamlet] and [Queen Gertrude], their son [Hamlet], and the King's brother [Claudius], who becomes king and marries [Gertrude] after his brother's death, as we know from Hamlet.5 The cast of characters is filled out...

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• Front matter

  Explorations in Renaissance Culture · 2022-04-11

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• The Book of Books: Biblical Interpretation, Literary Culture, and the Political Imagination from Erasmus to Milton

  Reformation · 2022 · 3 citations

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  • Political Science
  • Literature
  • Philosophy
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• : <i>Unsettled Toleration: Religious Difference on the Shakespearean Stage</i>

  Renaissance Quarterly · 2021-12-01

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  An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.

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• How Far Is Love From Charity?: The Literary Influence of Reformation Bible Translation

  Reformation · 2020 · 2 citations

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  • Sociology
  • Literature
  • Philosophy

  This essay explores the literary and cultural influence of post-Reformation English Bible translation. The massive influence of biblical language and ideas has been well studied, but the specific influence of the translation process, much smaller but still detectable, remains unrecognized. The name of one Bible scholar, Hugh Broughton, became a byword for exceptional or even impossible erudition, perhaps due to prominent references in the plays of Ben Jonson. More pervasive was the legacy of Thomas More and William Tyndale’s arguments about the appropriate translation of the Greek ἀγάπη (agapē) as either “love” or “charity,” revived in the 1580s by William Fulke and Gregory Martin. Allusions and wordplay in plays by Shakespeare and Robert Wilson, prose works by Robert Greene and John Lyly, poems by Henry Constable and John Davies of Hereford, and finally in Milton’s Paradise Lost demonstrate that audiences and readers were familiar with the philological controversy beginning in the 1530s.

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• Staging prophecy

  Manchester University Press eBooks · 2020-03-13

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  Hannibal Hamlin focuses on one significant play, A Looking Glasse for London, by Thomas Lodge and Robert Greene. Called the most popular biblical play of the Elizabethan stage, it is rich in spectacle and scandal – designed to succeed in the popular theatre. Yet Hamlin proposes that in both moralising and stagecraft it looks back to the mystery plays of the earlier fifteenth century. It thus offers a unique Elizabethan example of staging God himself, though done in such a peculiar way as to avoid censure.

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• Technology and the Humanities in Early Modern Studies

  Sixteenth Century Journal · 2019-03-01

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Frequent coauthors

• Norman W. Jones

  3 shared

• Glenn C. Graber

  University of Tennessee at Knoxville

  2 shared

• LINDA A. RANKIN

  University of Tennessee at Knoxville

  2 shared

• Jennifer Heyl

  2 shared

• Michael G. Brennan

  1 shared

• Susan Campbell

  1 shared

• Patricia Demers

  University of Alberta

  1 shared

• Christopher J. Armitage

  Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust

  1 shared

Awards & honors

• Frederick Burkhardt Residential Fellowship from the American…
• National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship at the Folg…
• National Humanities Center Fellowship (declined)
• Francis Bacon Foundation Fellowship at the Huntington Librar…
• Chairman’s Special Award from the NEH