AL Rowse counted some 25 references to the Cain and Abel story in Shakespeare’s plays. As You Like It has two – Duke Senior and Frederick, Oliver and Orlando. And there’s Hamlet Sr and Claudius, Edgar and Edmund, Prospero and his usurping brother. Not to mention all the brother-like rivalries that dot the plays – Laertes and Hamlet, Hotspur and Hal, Demetrius and Lysander, Valentine and Proteus.
Girard may be right: Shakespeare was an Elizabethan Girardian.
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