Hamlet and the Archpriest Controversy

After reading David Kaula’s essay, “Hamlet and the Image of Both Churches” I also read his book, Shakespeare and the Archpriest Controversy (Mouton 1975). The archpriest controversy was a conflict between Rome and the Jesuits, on the one hand, and the remaining local Catholic “secular” priests on the other, which involved a pamphlet war between the Jesuits and the seculars regarding who should lead the Catholics still worshiping in secret. The pamphlet war was encouraged by Robert Cecil and others to divide and conquer the Catholic opposition, so as to avoid popular support for a Catholic successor to Elizabeth. It's an interesting book and makes some good points.

Some writers in various ages have given the impression of English history that England broke from a corrupt Roman Catholic religious authority, and that a popular majority throughout the country suddenly embraced their liberation and a more righteous and true faith in the English Church.

But Cecil’s efforts to divide Catholic opposition via pamphlet war makes it clear that he and others still considered English Catholicism a significant threat to England’s independence from Rome as they approached the end of Elizabeth’s life.

The genius of grooming James to be the successor to Elizabeth was that he was the Protestant son of the Catholic Mary Queen of Scots, and his wife was thought to be a Danish Catholic. How better to mark the start of his reign than with public performances of Hamlet, the Dane?

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David Kaula is also the author of an interesting essay "Hamlet and the Image of Both Churches" (pp. 241-255, Vol. 24, No. 2, Spring, 1984 of Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900). In that essay, Kaula equates Gertrude with the Whore of Babylon, the Catholic church, and other Protestant-leaning allegories.

This is problematic, because Gertrude is one who, like Claudius, doesn't mourn long, which other scholars (like Stephen Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory) associate with the English church doing away with purgatory and monasteries where masses were said for the dead, so there's a cognitive dissonance if one asserts she is both the Whore of Babylon, associated with Catholicism and its internal corruption, and also typically Protestant in her abbreviated mourning.

Furthermore, Kaula is among those who notes Gertrude wiping the face of Hamlet, like Veronica wiping the face of Christ on his way to crucifixion. It's hard for Gertrude to be both Whore of Babylon and Veronica. In that way, I think it is more accurate to say that the play might seem to both invite and resist easy allegories.