Hamlet's Split Religious Personality
Many readers and viewers of Shakespeare's Hamlet don't notice the Catholic and Protestant rules and expectations that seem to govern Hamlet's outlook and that of his uncle Claudius and his father, the dead King Hamlet. But if we pay attention, we might wonder how the prince can survive so long in a state of religious whiplash.
Very different rules apply to the Ghost and to Claudius:
The ghost wants Hamlet to believe he is from purgatory - only there for a time (a Catholic belief), and that he’s there because he was caught unawares, sleeping in his garden, when he was poisoned, and therefore did not have time to receive the last sacraments from a priest before going to the final judgment. In the Catholic understanding, a priest would be necessary to hear his last confession, because Catholics believed only priests were empowered to help penitent sinners fully recognize their sins and be ready to be forgiven.
[Brian Blessed as Ghost in Hamlet directed by Kenneth Branagh, 1996]
But Hamlet attended Wittenberg, a Protestant university at the time of Shakespeare’s writing of the play. So when Hamlet sees Claudius at prayer, he believes Claudius may be expressing sorrow for his sins and may be forgiven.
- This is not the Roman Catholic understanding of how sins are forgiven: It’s the Protestant one.
- In the Roman Catholic understanding, a priest was necessary for auricular confession, meaning the sinner had to articulate one's sins: one had to put them into words for the priest while the priest was listening. Because a priest was not present to give King Hamlet the last sacraments, the Ghost claims this is the reason why he was sent to purgatory instead,
"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..."
- Regardless of the potential for a well-trained priest to help guide souls on the path to forgiveness, priests are also human and themselves sinners, prone to error. Protestantism stressed that it is God, and not a priest, by whose power and authority the sinner is forgiven, so one does not need a priest as an intermediary: one might simply confess one's sins to God in the secrecy of one's heart.
If Hamlet had been more consistent regarding both the apparition that claims to be his father's ghost, and with his praying Uncle, he might have applied either the Roman Catholic rules to both apparition and uncle, or the Protestant rules to both. He might have assumed that the ghost had been lying and was actually a demon from hell, if in fact he was acting like a good protestant; or if acting like a good Catholic, he might have assumed that, penitent or not, Clausius at prayer could not achieve forgiveness without the presence of a priest.
In this way, although religious expectations of Catholics and Protestants in late Elizabethan England may have had certain things in common, on points like this, they seemed mutually exclusive: either there was purgatory, or not. Either one needed the intermediary of a priest for the forgiveness of one's sins, or one did not.
Hamlet seems to want it both ways (or seems to want to prepare for both contingencies? Or shifts from one realm of religious expectations to the other without much explicit thought? Or can't say much more because of the censors?)
The whole reason for the play within the play ("The Mousetrap") is that Hamlet doesn't know whether to trust the Ghost's claims—about being from purgatory and about Claudius having murdered him. So he devises the play in order to test the conscience of Claudius. Right after Claudius ends the play prematurely, calls for more light, and leaves the room, Hamlet believes he can be certain that the Ghost was honest, and notes this to Horatio:
Hamlet: O good Horatio, I'll take the ghost's word for a thousand pound!
It's very shortly after this that Hamlet, after briefly arguing with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, unexpectedly comes upon Claudius at prayer on the way to his mother's closet. Having been schooled at Wittenberg and, we assume, influenced by the Protestant ideas of Luther, Hamlet now abandons all thought of what seems to be the ghost of his Catholic father in purgatory, and now he approaches Claudius at prayer with very Protestant expectations: If the play caught his conscience and he's sincerely asking for forgiveness, then would it be the worst possible time to kill a forgiven Claudius, when he'd go straight to heaven without stopping for purgatory? After all, his Catholic father seems to be in Catholic purgatory! How unfair for a Protestant uncle, his father's murderer, to go straight to heaven if playing by Protestant rules!
[David Tennant as Hamlet, and Sir Patrick Stewart as Claudius (and doubling as Ghost), 2009]
This seems almost darkly comic, that Prince Hamlet would be caught between Roman Catholic and Reformation expectation in this way: Instead of Dr. Strangelove as a darkly comic film about the Cold War and the dangers of nuclear annihilation, we have the Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, as a political satire black comedy: It touches upon many of the major late Tudor scandals as well as those relating to the family of James I: Henry VIII having affairs and having wives executed to marry again; the suspicious death (perhaps suicide?) of the daughter of William Cecil; the suspicion that the third husband of Mary, Queen of Scotts, arranged for the murder-by-bombing of her second husband, etc.
But it also touches on aspects of the English Reformation: Is there a purgatory, or were priests and monks taking advantage of people by having them pay to have masses said for the dead? Do priests really have sacramental authority to forgive sins, or can all Christians have their sins forgiven if they are contrite, beg God for mercy and forgiveness, and repent of their sins?
In a 1994 collection of essays called New Essays on Hamlet (a title destined to be quickly outdated), Robert Barrie's essay, "Telmahs: Carnival Laughter in Hamlet" (83-100) explores whether perhaps many aspects of the play were considered to be more humorous than modern audiences find them to be. He may be right, and the see-saw between Catholic and Protestant expectations for the Ghost and Claudius may be part of that dark humor.
What should people of England have anticipated, as Elizabeth left no heir? Henry VIII and his son Edward had broken from Rome, and Catholics were executed as treasonous, or for refusing to swear oaths of allegiance to the king. Mary I was Catholic and tried to steer the ship of state back to union with the Roman church, executing many Protestants as heretics by having them burned at the stake. Elizabeth's claim to the throne depended in part on the legitimacy of her father's annulment of his first (Catholic) marriage, so as expected, she was a Protestant queen. As James I was raised Protestant, but the son of a Catholic queen of Scotland, what could they have expected? Perhaps slightly more religious toleration?
Many find the play to be mostly about revenge and succession, about power and Machiavellian scheming, or about oedipal issues, and not about the Catholic-Protestant divide.
And yet if one looks for Protestant-Catholic themes, they abound:
- Protestantism had said that we are saved by "faith alone," and not by works. Hamlet certainly seems to have been saved by faith (and Providence, via pirates) on his sea-voyage, not by his own scheming that sends Rosencrantz & Guildenstern to their deaths. The sea-voyage is the turning point, where Hamlet is saved from his spiritual descent into evil and bloody thoughts; he is saved, he believes, by a merciful Providence that uses pirates as tools for working out rough-hewn destiny and grace.
- And yet there are still things ("works") after the sea-voyage that Hamlet must do with the time he has left: He must accept his own mortality, reconcile with Laertes, make reparations with Fortinbras, and after Claudius kills Gertrude and shows himself to be a dishonest ruler and threat to Denmark, Hamlet must kill the king to spare Denmark from more evils at his hands.
- Matthew 5:23-26 (Geneva) makes it clear that not merely faith, but also certain works are required:
23 If then thou bring thy gift to the altar, and there rememberest that thy brother hath ought against thee,
24 Leave there thine offering before the altar, and go thy way: first be reconciled to thy brother, and then come and offer thy gift.
25 Agree with thine adversary quickly, while thou art in the way with him, lest thine adversary deliver thee to the Judge, and the Judge deliver thee to the sergeant, and thou be cast into prison.
26 Verily I say unto thee, thou shalt not come out thence, till thou hast paid the utmost farthing.
This is the "fell sergeant, Death" to which Hamlet refers: Works of reconciliation are required of him before the end.
Catholics may claim that the failure of Claudius to achieve repentance from his sins in private prayer is perhaps covert proof that Shakespeare may have been questioning the Protestant assumptions about confession of sins in secret being sufficient, given that Claudius admits that he wasn’t fully ready to repent of his sins and what he had gained by them.
But then what happens later in the play regarding confession of sins? Hamlet and Laertes forgive one another’s sins, although it seems no ordained priest is present. It’s still an abbreviated form of auricular confession between two lay people, and they both absolve one another, as priests absolve sinners. It’s sort of Catholic, like an emergency baptism by a lay person, when no priest is present, and someone (infant, child, adult) is about to die. But it's not really traditional, sacramental, Roman Catholic confession as we'd normally recognize it either (which would have been illegal for Shakespeare to include in a play given laws of the time). It doesn't conform to either Protestant expectations or to Catholic ones.
We'd have to stretch our theology to note that, in baptism and anointing, all Christians share in the Threefold Office of Priest, Prophet and King, so to that extent, Hamlet and Laertes can absolve one another. But this certainly would not be a traditional Catholic interpretation.
So we're left with a sort of hybrid semi-sacramental reconciliation and faith, and Horatio quoting the Roman Catholic Requiem mass, but in the (Protestant?) vernacular instead of Latin: "flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!"
And as we understand the meaning of a musical rest symbol, we know a rest is always silence.
["Zainab Jah was cast as one of the first black women to be cast by a major theater (Philadelphia’s Wilma Theater in 2015) to play Hamlet. Her run was met with rave reviews." - from Great Lakes Theater 2017 Teacher Preparation Guide]
Very different rules apply to the Ghost and to Claudius:
The ghost wants Hamlet to believe he is from purgatory - only there for a time (a Catholic belief), and that he’s there because he was caught unawares, sleeping in his garden, when he was poisoned, and therefore did not have time to receive the last sacraments from a priest before going to the final judgment. In the Catholic understanding, a priest would be necessary to hear his last confession, because Catholics believed only priests were empowered to help penitent sinners fully recognize their sins and be ready to be forgiven.
[Brian Blessed as Ghost in Hamlet directed by Kenneth Branagh, 1996]
But Hamlet attended Wittenberg, a Protestant university at the time of Shakespeare’s writing of the play. So when Hamlet sees Claudius at prayer, he believes Claudius may be expressing sorrow for his sins and may be forgiven.
- This is not the Roman Catholic understanding of how sins are forgiven: It’s the Protestant one.
- In the Roman Catholic understanding, a priest was necessary for auricular confession, meaning the sinner had to articulate one's sins: one had to put them into words for the priest while the priest was listening. Because a priest was not present to give King Hamlet the last sacraments, the Ghost claims this is the reason why he was sent to purgatory instead,
"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..."
- Regardless of the potential for a well-trained priest to help guide souls on the path to forgiveness, priests are also human and themselves sinners, prone to error. Protestantism stressed that it is God, and not a priest, by whose power and authority the sinner is forgiven, so one does not need a priest as an intermediary: one might simply confess one's sins to God in the secrecy of one's heart.
If Hamlet had been more consistent regarding both the apparition that claims to be his father's ghost, and with his praying Uncle, he might have applied either the Roman Catholic rules to both apparition and uncle, or the Protestant rules to both. He might have assumed that the ghost had been lying and was actually a demon from hell, if in fact he was acting like a good protestant; or if acting like a good Catholic, he might have assumed that, penitent or not, Clausius at prayer could not achieve forgiveness without the presence of a priest.
In this way, although religious expectations of Catholics and Protestants in late Elizabethan England may have had certain things in common, on points like this, they seemed mutually exclusive: either there was purgatory, or not. Either one needed the intermediary of a priest for the forgiveness of one's sins, or one did not.
Hamlet seems to want it both ways (or seems to want to prepare for both contingencies? Or shifts from one realm of religious expectations to the other without much explicit thought? Or can't say much more because of the censors?)
The whole reason for the play within the play ("The Mousetrap") is that Hamlet doesn't know whether to trust the Ghost's claims—about being from purgatory and about Claudius having murdered him. So he devises the play in order to test the conscience of Claudius. Right after Claudius ends the play prematurely, calls for more light, and leaves the room, Hamlet believes he can be certain that the Ghost was honest, and notes this to Horatio:
Hamlet: O good Horatio, I'll take the ghost's word for a thousand pound!
It's very shortly after this that Hamlet, after briefly arguing with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, unexpectedly comes upon Claudius at prayer on the way to his mother's closet. Having been schooled at Wittenberg and, we assume, influenced by the Protestant ideas of Luther, Hamlet now abandons all thought of what seems to be the ghost of his Catholic father in purgatory, and now he approaches Claudius at prayer with very Protestant expectations: If the play caught his conscience and he's sincerely asking for forgiveness, then would it be the worst possible time to kill a forgiven Claudius, when he'd go straight to heaven without stopping for purgatory? After all, his Catholic father seems to be in Catholic purgatory! How unfair for a Protestant uncle, his father's murderer, to go straight to heaven if playing by Protestant rules!
[David Tennant as Hamlet, and Sir Patrick Stewart as Claudius (and doubling as Ghost), 2009]
This seems almost darkly comic, that Prince Hamlet would be caught between Roman Catholic and Reformation expectation in this way: Instead of Dr. Strangelove as a darkly comic film about the Cold War and the dangers of nuclear annihilation, we have the Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, as a political satire black comedy: It touches upon many of the major late Tudor scandals as well as those relating to the family of James I: Henry VIII having affairs and having wives executed to marry again; the suspicious death (perhaps suicide?) of the daughter of William Cecil; the suspicion that the third husband of Mary, Queen of Scotts, arranged for the murder-by-bombing of her second husband, etc.
But it also touches on aspects of the English Reformation: Is there a purgatory, or were priests and monks taking advantage of people by having them pay to have masses said for the dead? Do priests really have sacramental authority to forgive sins, or can all Christians have their sins forgiven if they are contrite, beg God for mercy and forgiveness, and repent of their sins?
In a 1994 collection of essays called New Essays on Hamlet (a title destined to be quickly outdated), Robert Barrie's essay, "Telmahs: Carnival Laughter in Hamlet" (83-100) explores whether perhaps many aspects of the play were considered to be more humorous than modern audiences find them to be. He may be right, and the see-saw between Catholic and Protestant expectations for the Ghost and Claudius may be part of that dark humor.
What should people of England have anticipated, as Elizabeth left no heir? Henry VIII and his son Edward had broken from Rome, and Catholics were executed as treasonous, or for refusing to swear oaths of allegiance to the king. Mary I was Catholic and tried to steer the ship of state back to union with the Roman church, executing many Protestants as heretics by having them burned at the stake. Elizabeth's claim to the throne depended in part on the legitimacy of her father's annulment of his first (Catholic) marriage, so as expected, she was a Protestant queen. As James I was raised Protestant, but the son of a Catholic queen of Scotland, what could they have expected? Perhaps slightly more religious toleration?
Many find the play to be mostly about revenge and succession, about power and Machiavellian scheming, or about oedipal issues, and not about the Catholic-Protestant divide.
And yet if one looks for Protestant-Catholic themes, they abound:
- Protestantism had said that we are saved by "faith alone," and not by works. Hamlet certainly seems to have been saved by faith (and Providence, via pirates) on his sea-voyage, not by his own scheming that sends Rosencrantz & Guildenstern to their deaths. The sea-voyage is the turning point, where Hamlet is saved from his spiritual descent into evil and bloody thoughts; he is saved, he believes, by a merciful Providence that uses pirates as tools for working out rough-hewn destiny and grace.
- And yet there are still things ("works") after the sea-voyage that Hamlet must do with the time he has left: He must accept his own mortality, reconcile with Laertes, make reparations with Fortinbras, and after Claudius kills Gertrude and shows himself to be a dishonest ruler and threat to Denmark, Hamlet must kill the king to spare Denmark from more evils at his hands.
- Matthew 5:23-26 (Geneva) makes it clear that not merely faith, but also certain works are required:
23 If then thou bring thy gift to the altar, and there rememberest that thy brother hath ought against thee,
24 Leave there thine offering before the altar, and go thy way: first be reconciled to thy brother, and then come and offer thy gift.
25 Agree with thine adversary quickly, while thou art in the way with him, lest thine adversary deliver thee to the Judge, and the Judge deliver thee to the sergeant, and thou be cast into prison.
26 Verily I say unto thee, thou shalt not come out thence, till thou hast paid the utmost farthing.
This is the "fell sergeant, Death" to which Hamlet refers: Works of reconciliation are required of him before the end.
Catholics may claim that the failure of Claudius to achieve repentance from his sins in private prayer is perhaps covert proof that Shakespeare may have been questioning the Protestant assumptions about confession of sins in secret being sufficient, given that Claudius admits that he wasn’t fully ready to repent of his sins and what he had gained by them.
But then what happens later in the play regarding confession of sins? Hamlet and Laertes forgive one another’s sins, although it seems no ordained priest is present. It’s still an abbreviated form of auricular confession between two lay people, and they both absolve one another, as priests absolve sinners. It’s sort of Catholic, like an emergency baptism by a lay person, when no priest is present, and someone (infant, child, adult) is about to die. But it's not really traditional, sacramental, Roman Catholic confession as we'd normally recognize it either (which would have been illegal for Shakespeare to include in a play given laws of the time). It doesn't conform to either Protestant expectations or to Catholic ones.
We'd have to stretch our theology to note that, in baptism and anointing, all Christians share in the Threefold Office of Priest, Prophet and King, so to that extent, Hamlet and Laertes can absolve one another. But this certainly would not be a traditional Catholic interpretation.
So we're left with a sort of hybrid semi-sacramental reconciliation and faith, and Horatio quoting the Roman Catholic Requiem mass, but in the (Protestant?) vernacular instead of Latin: "flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!"
And as we understand the meaning of a musical rest symbol, we know a rest is always silence.
["Zainab Jah was cast as one of the first black women to be cast by a major theater (Philadelphia’s Wilma Theater in 2015) to play Hamlet. Her run was met with rave reviews." - from Great Lakes Theater 2017 Teacher Preparation Guide]
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