Hamlet, the Mystical Body, & the Body Politic
Hamlet, the Mystical Body, & the Body Politic /or/ Everybody's Got a Mystical Body, but Some are Bigger &/or Better Than Others
Shakespeare’s Hamlet contains many references to the mystical body and well as to the body politic. Early in the play, Laertes warns his sister Ophelia not to set her hopes too high on a relationship with Prince Hamlet. He warns her, not only because she could get pregnant and bring scandal to their family, but also because Hamlet may have to marry some foreign princess, say, to secure a treaty, or taking popular opinion into account so that his choice of a bride doesn't inspire resentment in a body politic that would at times be expected to yield to him as well (factors Elizabeth also faced):
Laertes: He may not, as unvalued persons do, /
Carve for himself; for on his choice depends /
The safety and health of this whole state; /
And therefore must his choice be circumscribed /
Unto the voice and yielding of that body /
Whereof he is the head.
Later in the play (4.2), Rosencrantz and Guildenstern ask Hamlet where he has placed the body of Polonius, and in the course of Hamlet’s responses, he says, “The King is with the body, but the body is not with the King,” a reference to "the king's two bodies," an idea that was sometimes popular (and sometimes disputed) in Elizabethan times and earlier: Like Jesus, the king has a natural (biological) body that lives and dies, but according to some, the king also has another body, the body politic. The king's relationship to the body politic is something like the relationship of Jesus to the church, as king and Jesus are the "head" of these "bodies." Ernst Kantorowicz wrote a 1957 book that has become a classic study of this idea, and Jennifer Rust of St. Louis University has written a 2013 book that updates, critiques, and expands some of Kantorowicz’s ideas, as well as applying them to certain Shakespeare plays.
This idea of the king as head of the body politic is borrowed especially from the letters of St. Paul, who describes the risen Christ as the head of the church, and the members of the church as members of something like a body: Each has a role to play, as the various parts of the body do, so it’s best if the parts of the social body of the church cooperate in humility, respecting the diversity of roles and the leadership of Jesus, who washed the feet of his disciples to show the kind of head he would be. (The example of Jesus as humble servant of the body of his disciples is an ideal that many Christian royalty, popes, and clergy through history have fallen short of meeting.)
The mystical body of the church has often been somewhat mechanically described as those who receive the sacraments, especially the Eucharist, the bread supposedly changed into Christ’s body in memory of the Last Supper. Many have noted that the ghost's command, "Remember," echoes or parodies the statement of Jesus at the Last Supper, "When you do this, remember me." For Jesus, this is a banquet of love that underscores his sense that the disciples who have internalized his teachings are intimately united to him; for the ghost, it's the commissioning of a revenge quest.
The ghost in Hamlet claims that, because Claudius killed him unexpectedly while he was sleeping in his garden, he did not have time to receive the sacraments, to confess his sins, receive Eucharist, and be anointed before death:
Cut off even in the blossoms of my sin, /
Unhousel'd, disappointed, unanel'd, /
No reckoning made, but sent to my account /
With all my imperfections on my head.
These are supposedly reasons why he is not in heaven but in something that he describes as being like purgatory, a transition state in which sins are purged before his spirit can enter heaven.
(So boo-hoo: Call the whaaambulance. The dead king had killed Old Fortinbras, taken his land, and inspired the now-grown son of Fortinbras to launch a war to get the land back—a war that has all of Denmark anxious and wasting time and resources, with soldiers and sentinels fearing for their lives—but if only the dead king had better timing and had gotten the sacraments, he'd be scot-free and inside heaven's gates, leaving a messed-up Denmark to the chumps who are still living. Right. And maybe he has a bridge to sell us too?)
Unless of course he’s a demon who has disguised himself like the dead king, and is lying about being in purgatory, which would be considered the more Protestant interpretation, since Protestants rejected the idea of purgatory.
Scholars sometimes speak of the ghost’s claims about the sacraments with a sort of detachment that is as mechanical in their view as the ghost’s: The assumption seems to be that it’s some Catholic ritual that of course we moderns no longer believe, but there it is, an allusion in the play that we would do well, somehow, to notice, because yes, there was that Catholic-Protestant tug-of-war at the time.
I would propose that these ideas about mystical and political bodies were probably misused over the centuries, and that they originally spoke to realities that still lay claim to us. When scholars speak of such things, they’re not just external artifacts of some silly, superstitious and outdated ritual, but things in which our own lives and social realities are involved, so achieving objectivity in analyzing and discussing them might include some self-reflection.
In her 1981 book, The Passionate God, Rosemary Haughton offers some ideas that help. She claims that our way of understanding reality tends toward seeing many things as unrelated, when in fact, the many things we come to know are in a constant state of interaction with one another. Along these lines, she says that there are various definitions of the phrase, “the body of Christ”: It is thought of as
the biological body of Jesus, who was born, lived, and was crucified;
the risen body of Jesus who appeared after his death and ascended into heaven;
the Eucharist, the bread and wine that Catholics claim to be “transubstantiated” into the body and blood of Christ;
the Church or mystical body of Christ, made up of its members.
Haughton claims that certain of these definitions of the body of Christ are sometimes thought of as separate realities, independent of one another, when in fact, they have more to do with each other than we often think.
She also claims that we have to stop thinking of our bodies in terms of the limits of our skin. Ah, there’s the rub! She's not just another Catholic, asking non-Catholics to accept the idea of transubstantiation, but offering the possibility that we all—Catholics included—might have some basic flawed assumptions in our understandings, including our self-understanding. This might be an especially common flaw in Western cultures with commerce economies, which like to make fine distinctions about property rights, but which might be worse at recognizing shared social responsibilities than so-called primitive cultures with gift economies.
We think of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Nelson Mandela as people who inspired movements; these were inspired, in part, by Gandhi, who was in turn inspired, in part, by Henry David Thoreau’s civil disobedience; Thoreau and all the rest were inspired in part by the peaceful non-resistance to enemies preached by Jesus in the gospels. Haughton might say that Mandela, King, Gandhi, Thoreau, and Jesus very clearly had bodies that were greater than the limits of their skin, located in the movements they inspired.
But there is more: One need not be a famous person to have a spiritual body larger than the limits of one’s skin. In her novel, Middlemarch, Mary Anne Evans (George Eliot) includes the following often-quoted passage:
But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.
Not only do we stand on the shoulders of giants, as they say; we also stand on the shoulders of many humble, hard-working, generous 'little people,' relatively unknown, but possessing larger spiritual bodies than we normally think. Some religious traditions stress that it's better to do good for others in secret than it is to do good deeds in a more public way. The above passage by Evans recognizes this possibility.
(Note that I did not say we stand on the shoulders of dwarfs, although Peter Dinklage might be fine with that; so-called 'little people' may have giant spiritual bodies, and tall or obese people can be spiritual misers, so the point is to avoid judging things too much by externals.)
Unsung heroes on whose lives those of many others depend are relatively invisible. Albert Einstein says something similar in his 1949 book, The World As I See It:
What an extraordinary situation is that of us mortals! Each of us is here for a brief sojourn; for what purpose he knows not, though he sometimes thinks he feels it. But from the point of view of daily life, without going deeper, we exist for our fellow-men--in the first place for those on whose smiles and welfare all our happiness depends, and next for all those unknown to us personally with whose destinies we are bound up by the tie of sympathy. A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life depend on the labours of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received and am still receiving.
To paraphrase Rosemary Haughton, not only should we stop thinking of our bodies in terms of the limits of our skin; we should also recognize how our spiritual bodies and the effects of our actions overlap in the world. We are the recipients of many gifts from more sources than can be traced; as our spiritual bodies move out into the world, we come to share a larger body with others who depend on many of the same sources of gifts in the world as we do, and whose actions also affect the body of that world. We should therefore live generously to repay, and pay forward, some of what we have received.
But there is still more: One of Shakespeare's characters notes that it is not only our good actions that have a body in the world which can survive our deaths: In Julius Caesar (3.2), Anthony notes, “The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones.” Let's set aside for now whether Anthony's relative pessimism about the good is merely a reflection of the fictional character's position, or also that of the playwright. We know from experience that evil also has a spiritual body that persists in the world: Hitler is dead, but neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups persist. Or as Salon founder and best-selling author David Talbot might note, even after Allen Dulles is dead, "dark" tactics of torture, surveillance, infiltration, propaganda, and subversion that he used and oversaw persist and are further developed and extended.
These "bodies" of evil in the world are why there was something rotten in Denmark: The "emulate pride" of King Hamlet pricked him on to fight Old Fortinbras in a life-gamble that was about greed for land and power, and the effects of this choice, and of Claudius' murder of his brother, have a rotten body that persists in that fictional world of the play.
These realities are at the heart of what has sometimes been abused or (to use a term coined by George W. Bush) misunderestimated in the legal concept of "the king’s two bodies" and in a merely mechanical-ritual view of Christian Eucharist. In fact, these are realities that we all participate in, regardless of whether we are Christian or people of faith, as the quotes by Mary Anne Evans and Albert Einstein suggest.
Hamlet includes other body references, three of which I'll mention here: First, what the prince says regarding the supper, "Not where he eats, but where he is eaten," could apply to Catholic's understanding of Christ in the Eucharist as well as to Polonius being eaten by worms.
Second, the play contains body references which relate not only to the idea of marriage as two people sharing one body (two become "one flesh"), but also to the gospel passages in which Jesus talks about how, if your eye offends you, you should pluck it out; if your hand offends you, you should cut it off; better to enter the kingdom of heaven without these than to burn for eternity, etc. (Matt 5:29-30, Matt 18:7-9). This comes up in the closet scene (3.4), where Gertrude tells Hamlet that his words have cut her heart in two; he replies that she should throw away the worser part (her murderous husband, Claudius) and stop sleeping with him. To paraphrase the gospel passage, "If your husband and king offends you (and the kingdom), cut him off."
In other words, Shakespeare implies that Christian nations may at times have to consider cutting off a criminal king, the head of the body politic, in order to help the rest of the body enter the reign of heaven. Although Shakespeare has a number of plays in which leaders are killed, this is radical stuff in Elizabethan times and had to be written carefully to avoid trouble with the censors, as we assume at least a majority of people then were mostly hierarchical in their thinking, believing that, due to the divine right of kings, even suffering under a bad king may have been the hand of a just God, punishing his people for their sins.
And a third and final body reference: Before the sword fight in the last scene, Hamlet asks Horatio, "is't not to be damn'd, / To let this canker of our nature come / In further evil?" To Hamlet, his murderous uncle is a canker sore, an infection, and it threatens to spread and do more harm to the body politic. A good doctor would take action against the infected spot to save the life of the patient; Prince Hamlet as the rightful king might take action against a conspiring, murderous usurper to save the life of the country.
Shakespeare’s Hamlet alludes to these realities of spiritual and political bodies, and to their abuse, especially by kings who fall short of the Christian ideal. Scholars who write about such ideas would do better to imagine themselves not as scientists in a lab, examining realities independent of themselves, like dissecting a frog or analyzing ice core samples from Antarctica; but rather, analyzing realities in which we, ourselves, participate.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Paul Adrian Fried has an MFA in Creative Writing and taught university English for 21 years. His current project is a book, tentatively titled "Hamlet's Bible," about biblical allusions and deep plot echoes in Shakespeare's play. He posts weekly
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Links to a description of my book project:
On LinkedIn: https://lnkd.in/eJGBtqV
On this blog: https://pauladrianfried.blogspot.com/2017/05/hamlets-bible-my-book-project-im.html
[Originally posted 8/8/17 on LinkedIn]
Shakespeare’s Hamlet contains many references to the mystical body and well as to the body politic. Early in the play, Laertes warns his sister Ophelia not to set her hopes too high on a relationship with Prince Hamlet. He warns her, not only because she could get pregnant and bring scandal to their family, but also because Hamlet may have to marry some foreign princess, say, to secure a treaty, or taking popular opinion into account so that his choice of a bride doesn't inspire resentment in a body politic that would at times be expected to yield to him as well (factors Elizabeth also faced):
Laertes: He may not, as unvalued persons do, /
Carve for himself; for on his choice depends /
The safety and health of this whole state; /
And therefore must his choice be circumscribed /
Unto the voice and yielding of that body /
Whereof he is the head.
Later in the play (4.2), Rosencrantz and Guildenstern ask Hamlet where he has placed the body of Polonius, and in the course of Hamlet’s responses, he says, “The King is with the body, but the body is not with the King,” a reference to "the king's two bodies," an idea that was sometimes popular (and sometimes disputed) in Elizabethan times and earlier: Like Jesus, the king has a natural (biological) body that lives and dies, but according to some, the king also has another body, the body politic. The king's relationship to the body politic is something like the relationship of Jesus to the church, as king and Jesus are the "head" of these "bodies." Ernst Kantorowicz wrote a 1957 book that has become a classic study of this idea, and Jennifer Rust of St. Louis University has written a 2013 book that updates, critiques, and expands some of Kantorowicz’s ideas, as well as applying them to certain Shakespeare plays.
This idea of the king as head of the body politic is borrowed especially from the letters of St. Paul, who describes the risen Christ as the head of the church, and the members of the church as members of something like a body: Each has a role to play, as the various parts of the body do, so it’s best if the parts of the social body of the church cooperate in humility, respecting the diversity of roles and the leadership of Jesus, who washed the feet of his disciples to show the kind of head he would be. (The example of Jesus as humble servant of the body of his disciples is an ideal that many Christian royalty, popes, and clergy through history have fallen short of meeting.)
The mystical body of the church has often been somewhat mechanically described as those who receive the sacraments, especially the Eucharist, the bread supposedly changed into Christ’s body in memory of the Last Supper. Many have noted that the ghost's command, "Remember," echoes or parodies the statement of Jesus at the Last Supper, "When you do this, remember me." For Jesus, this is a banquet of love that underscores his sense that the disciples who have internalized his teachings are intimately united to him; for the ghost, it's the commissioning of a revenge quest.
The ghost in Hamlet claims that, because Claudius killed him unexpectedly while he was sleeping in his garden, he did not have time to receive the sacraments, to confess his sins, receive Eucharist, and be anointed before death:
Cut off even in the blossoms of my sin, /
Unhousel'd, disappointed, unanel'd, /
No reckoning made, but sent to my account /
With all my imperfections on my head.
These are supposedly reasons why he is not in heaven but in something that he describes as being like purgatory, a transition state in which sins are purged before his spirit can enter heaven.
(So boo-hoo: Call the whaaambulance. The dead king had killed Old Fortinbras, taken his land, and inspired the now-grown son of Fortinbras to launch a war to get the land back—a war that has all of Denmark anxious and wasting time and resources, with soldiers and sentinels fearing for their lives—but if only the dead king had better timing and had gotten the sacraments, he'd be scot-free and inside heaven's gates, leaving a messed-up Denmark to the chumps who are still living. Right. And maybe he has a bridge to sell us too?)
Unless of course he’s a demon who has disguised himself like the dead king, and is lying about being in purgatory, which would be considered the more Protestant interpretation, since Protestants rejected the idea of purgatory.
Scholars sometimes speak of the ghost’s claims about the sacraments with a sort of detachment that is as mechanical in their view as the ghost’s: The assumption seems to be that it’s some Catholic ritual that of course we moderns no longer believe, but there it is, an allusion in the play that we would do well, somehow, to notice, because yes, there was that Catholic-Protestant tug-of-war at the time.
I would propose that these ideas about mystical and political bodies were probably misused over the centuries, and that they originally spoke to realities that still lay claim to us. When scholars speak of such things, they’re not just external artifacts of some silly, superstitious and outdated ritual, but things in which our own lives and social realities are involved, so achieving objectivity in analyzing and discussing them might include some self-reflection.
In her 1981 book, The Passionate God, Rosemary Haughton offers some ideas that help. She claims that our way of understanding reality tends toward seeing many things as unrelated, when in fact, the many things we come to know are in a constant state of interaction with one another. Along these lines, she says that there are various definitions of the phrase, “the body of Christ”: It is thought of as
the biological body of Jesus, who was born, lived, and was crucified;
the risen body of Jesus who appeared after his death and ascended into heaven;
the Eucharist, the bread and wine that Catholics claim to be “transubstantiated” into the body and blood of Christ;
the Church or mystical body of Christ, made up of its members.
Haughton claims that certain of these definitions of the body of Christ are sometimes thought of as separate realities, independent of one another, when in fact, they have more to do with each other than we often think.
She also claims that we have to stop thinking of our bodies in terms of the limits of our skin. Ah, there’s the rub! She's not just another Catholic, asking non-Catholics to accept the idea of transubstantiation, but offering the possibility that we all—Catholics included—might have some basic flawed assumptions in our understandings, including our self-understanding. This might be an especially common flaw in Western cultures with commerce economies, which like to make fine distinctions about property rights, but which might be worse at recognizing shared social responsibilities than so-called primitive cultures with gift economies.
We think of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Nelson Mandela as people who inspired movements; these were inspired, in part, by Gandhi, who was in turn inspired, in part, by Henry David Thoreau’s civil disobedience; Thoreau and all the rest were inspired in part by the peaceful non-resistance to enemies preached by Jesus in the gospels. Haughton might say that Mandela, King, Gandhi, Thoreau, and Jesus very clearly had bodies that were greater than the limits of their skin, located in the movements they inspired.
But there is more: One need not be a famous person to have a spiritual body larger than the limits of one’s skin. In her novel, Middlemarch, Mary Anne Evans (George Eliot) includes the following often-quoted passage:
But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.
Not only do we stand on the shoulders of giants, as they say; we also stand on the shoulders of many humble, hard-working, generous 'little people,' relatively unknown, but possessing larger spiritual bodies than we normally think. Some religious traditions stress that it's better to do good for others in secret than it is to do good deeds in a more public way. The above passage by Evans recognizes this possibility.
(Note that I did not say we stand on the shoulders of dwarfs, although Peter Dinklage might be fine with that; so-called 'little people' may have giant spiritual bodies, and tall or obese people can be spiritual misers, so the point is to avoid judging things too much by externals.)
Unsung heroes on whose lives those of many others depend are relatively invisible. Albert Einstein says something similar in his 1949 book, The World As I See It:
What an extraordinary situation is that of us mortals! Each of us is here for a brief sojourn; for what purpose he knows not, though he sometimes thinks he feels it. But from the point of view of daily life, without going deeper, we exist for our fellow-men--in the first place for those on whose smiles and welfare all our happiness depends, and next for all those unknown to us personally with whose destinies we are bound up by the tie of sympathy. A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life depend on the labours of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received and am still receiving.
To paraphrase Rosemary Haughton, not only should we stop thinking of our bodies in terms of the limits of our skin; we should also recognize how our spiritual bodies and the effects of our actions overlap in the world. We are the recipients of many gifts from more sources than can be traced; as our spiritual bodies move out into the world, we come to share a larger body with others who depend on many of the same sources of gifts in the world as we do, and whose actions also affect the body of that world. We should therefore live generously to repay, and pay forward, some of what we have received.
But there is still more: One of Shakespeare's characters notes that it is not only our good actions that have a body in the world which can survive our deaths: In Julius Caesar (3.2), Anthony notes, “The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones.” Let's set aside for now whether Anthony's relative pessimism about the good is merely a reflection of the fictional character's position, or also that of the playwright. We know from experience that evil also has a spiritual body that persists in the world: Hitler is dead, but neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups persist. Or as Salon founder and best-selling author David Talbot might note, even after Allen Dulles is dead, "dark" tactics of torture, surveillance, infiltration, propaganda, and subversion that he used and oversaw persist and are further developed and extended.
These "bodies" of evil in the world are why there was something rotten in Denmark: The "emulate pride" of King Hamlet pricked him on to fight Old Fortinbras in a life-gamble that was about greed for land and power, and the effects of this choice, and of Claudius' murder of his brother, have a rotten body that persists in that fictional world of the play.
These realities are at the heart of what has sometimes been abused or (to use a term coined by George W. Bush) misunderestimated in the legal concept of "the king’s two bodies" and in a merely mechanical-ritual view of Christian Eucharist. In fact, these are realities that we all participate in, regardless of whether we are Christian or people of faith, as the quotes by Mary Anne Evans and Albert Einstein suggest.
Hamlet includes other body references, three of which I'll mention here: First, what the prince says regarding the supper, "Not where he eats, but where he is eaten," could apply to Catholic's understanding of Christ in the Eucharist as well as to Polonius being eaten by worms.
Second, the play contains body references which relate not only to the idea of marriage as two people sharing one body (two become "one flesh"), but also to the gospel passages in which Jesus talks about how, if your eye offends you, you should pluck it out; if your hand offends you, you should cut it off; better to enter the kingdom of heaven without these than to burn for eternity, etc. (Matt 5:29-30, Matt 18:7-9). This comes up in the closet scene (3.4), where Gertrude tells Hamlet that his words have cut her heart in two; he replies that she should throw away the worser part (her murderous husband, Claudius) and stop sleeping with him. To paraphrase the gospel passage, "If your husband and king offends you (and the kingdom), cut him off."
In other words, Shakespeare implies that Christian nations may at times have to consider cutting off a criminal king, the head of the body politic, in order to help the rest of the body enter the reign of heaven. Although Shakespeare has a number of plays in which leaders are killed, this is radical stuff in Elizabethan times and had to be written carefully to avoid trouble with the censors, as we assume at least a majority of people then were mostly hierarchical in their thinking, believing that, due to the divine right of kings, even suffering under a bad king may have been the hand of a just God, punishing his people for their sins.
And a third and final body reference: Before the sword fight in the last scene, Hamlet asks Horatio, "is't not to be damn'd, / To let this canker of our nature come / In further evil?" To Hamlet, his murderous uncle is a canker sore, an infection, and it threatens to spread and do more harm to the body politic. A good doctor would take action against the infected spot to save the life of the patient; Prince Hamlet as the rightful king might take action against a conspiring, murderous usurper to save the life of the country.
Shakespeare’s Hamlet alludes to these realities of spiritual and political bodies, and to their abuse, especially by kings who fall short of the Christian ideal. Scholars who write about such ideas would do better to imagine themselves not as scientists in a lab, examining realities independent of themselves, like dissecting a frog or analyzing ice core samples from Antarctica; but rather, analyzing realities in which we, ourselves, participate.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Paul Adrian Fried has an MFA in Creative Writing and taught university English for 21 years. His current project is a book, tentatively titled "Hamlet's Bible," about biblical allusions and deep plot echoes in Shakespeare's play. He posts weekly
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Links to a description of my book project:
On LinkedIn: https://lnkd.in/eJGBtqV
On this blog: https://pauladrianfried.blogspot.com/2017/05/hamlets-bible-my-book-project-im.html
[Originally posted 8/8/17 on LinkedIn]
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