Horatio: "A piece of him" as Eucharistic controversy pamphlet joke?

Horatio: A piece of him / Eucharistic controversy pamphlet joke

In Shakespeare's Hamlet, Horatio's line on the cold night is curious:
BERNARDO: Say, / What, is Horatio there?
HORATIO: A piece of him.

Stephen Greenblatt's "Hamlet in Purgatory" gives examples of Tudor-era Protestant pamphlets about Eucharist and their humorous phrasing of skepticism about Roman Catholic ideas of transubstantiation, where bread and wine supposedly become the body and blood of Christ:
~ If priests consecrate hosts at thousands of masses worldwide at the same time, how many tons of Jesus does that make?
~ And which part of Jesus do I get today? Etc.

Greenblatt doesn't mention it, but Horatio's line, "A piece of him,"
COULD point (in part) to then-familiar Protestant humor about Catholic Eucharist.

Some jokes become so familiar that we know opening lines, punch lines, & basic structure by heart:
"A [ ], a [ ], and a [ ] walked into a bar...."
"What did the [ ] say to the [ ]?"

If Horatio's remark is a shorthand reference to fun poked at RC Eucharist,
and If the joke is as familiar as the proliferation of pamphlets suggest,
everyone gets it.

But once the old pamphlets are forgotten,
Horatio's joke would be lost on us;
we might only think he'd rather be elsewhere,
or think anachronistically of Al Pacino's film line: "You want a piece of me?"

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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 around the week of 8/14/17 on LinkedIn]