"Not the Resuscitation of a Corpse": How Literally did Shakespeare Take the Bible? (Who am I to Interpret Hamlet? Part 2: Religious Assumptions)

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This is a continuation of a four-part series of blog posts, “Who am I to interpret Hamlet?”
June 16, 2019: To be or not? (Part 1: English Studies & Teaching)
June 23: How Literally Did Shakespeare Take the Bible? (Part 2: Religious Studies & Assumptions)
July 30: Reading Hamlet through personal & national traumas (Part 3: Lies & PTSD)
August 6: Hamlet, PTSD & Entitlement (Part 4)
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The first sentence in Hamlet is a question that Bernardo asks Francisco: “Who’s there?”  If the audience feels that the question is directed at all of us as well, we might ask: Who are we, reading or viewing this play?

This week I’ll consider some key moments in my religious studies that changed my assumptions about the Christianity in which I was raised, assumptions I also ruminate about in my study of Shakespeare generally, and Hamlet in particular.

Who am I as a person who studied not only literature but also theology, and how does that influence my perspective on Shakespeare? And more specifically, how did my theology studies later influence my understanding of how literally Shakespeare took the bible?

I studied English and Theology for the BA at the College of St. Thomas (later, University). A few Theology professors there had a profound influence on my thinking. These included Don Briel and then-Rev. (now bishop) Arthur Kennedy.

[Don Briel. Photo via University of St. Mary]

Don founded the Center for Catholic Studies at St. Thomas and gained national attention for it, as well as going on to head a similar program at St. Mary's University in North Dakota. He died in February of 2018 at 71 of a rare form of leukemia.


[Arthur Kennedy. Photo via Archdiocese of Boston.]

Arthur had studied with Canadian Jesuit philosopher and theologian Bernard Lonergan, author of Insight and Method in Theology. (There are still Lonergan workshops held at Boston College; I attended one of these shortly after graduating from college.)

Paradigms and Paradigm Shifts
Theology majors were required to take a course in either “The Church” or “Sacramentality.” I thought I’d enjoy Sacramentality more than the stuffy-sounding “The Church,” but I decided to utilize my options for dropping and adding within the early weeks of the semester and sign up for both, then drop the one that didn’t seem a good fit. From attending just the first meetings of each classes, I knew that Don Briel would take a fresh and thoughtful approach to a potentially stuffy topic. Among other things, we read a text by Rosemary Haughton (author of The Catholic Thing and The Passionate God), and by Avery Dulles, Models of the Church.

Dulles's book is about different paradigms for thinking about what the church is and does. These included six models: the church as
Mystical Communion,
Sacrament,
Servant,
Herald,
Institution, and
Community of Disciples.

For my final paper in the class, I combined elements of church as sacrament and as servant; I didn't like the idea of a self-righteous and often flawed church assuming it could act as a sacrament of transcendence in the world unless there was something to clarify how that occurred, so I said that the church should take Jesus' words, "Whatever you do unto the least of these, you do unto me" as a call to service as sacrament; if and when members and communities of people did this, then the church might be understood as a sacrament, but perhaps not without it. Don Briel liked my paper so much he not only gave me an A, but said it took his breath away, and he apologized for having to resort to hyperbole. This was some of the highest praise I ever received on a college essay.

Dulles's book invited me to consider how we think in paradigms, how people disagree at times because they think in different or potentially conflicting paradigms, and how people might be open (or not) to intellectual conversion regarding their dominant paradigms. (One finds divergent and potentially conflicting paradigms also among Shakespeare scholars, as well as among those who study Shakespeare and the Bible.)

In either Don or Arthur's class, we also read a book by John Shea, Stories of God: An Unauthorized Biography, which I’ll come back to shortly.

Transcendental Methodology via Aquinas
Arthur Kennedy’s class in Theological Methods was remarkable, based largely on Lonergan, whose method has a fourfold structure influenced by Aquinas. There is a prayer of Thomas Aquinas which goes,
Grant O merciful God
That I may ardently desire, [at the level of experience]
Prudently examine, [at the level of understanding]
Truthfully acknowledge, [at the level of judgment, or exercise “good judgment”)
And perfectly accomplish [at the level of choices or decisions]
what is pleasing to thee, to the praise and glory of thy name.

[Bernard Lonergan, S.J. Photo via Michael McCarthy book, Authenticity as Self-Transcendence

Lonergan’s method has eight “functional specialties,” the first four of them structured around experience, understanding, judgment, and decision, with a transcendent goal (transcending previous experience, previous understanding, previous good judgement, previous habits of choice). This aims toward a deepening growth and sometimes conversion as a person, a change of heart or mind, or as mentioned above, perhaps a change of paradigms.

Then one takes the fruits of this transcendental process and communicates it. The religious person might evangelize, the scientist might teach and share results, the artist might share one’s art, etc., making new choices, exercising good judgment, good understanding, and creating new experiences. By sharing the fruits of one’s research, understanding, judgment and paradigm shifts, others might benefit.

The functional specialties can also operate non-sequentially, so one might move back and forth, or hop around. That’s life: It is often a bit chaotic, non-sequential, but we wrestle with our experiences, with our angels and demons.

This fourfold understanding of human consciousness is limited and doesn’t account for imagination or differentiate about feelings or memory, but I recall how much my performance in my other college classes improved after I took this class and understood some basics about the working of my own mind.

Given this foundation regarding paradigms and method, two of my greatest milestones in my theology studies had to do with how I came to change my thinking about the resurrection, and how I changed my idea of confirmation, or Christian coming-of-age rituals and what they lack.

“Not the Resuscitation of a Corpse”
Regarding the resurrection, my Theology studies radicalized me. In a book on Christology by Dutch theologian Edvard Schillibeeckx, he mentioned how a variety of theologians were using the phrase, “The resurrection was not the resuscitation of a corpse.” This was a surprise to me, because it seemed every Catholic priest I’d heard speak on Sundays (especially Easter Sunday) implied that the resurrection was in fact a supernatural resuscitation of Jesus’ corpse. We read a series of essays based on the ideas of another famous Catholic theologian, Karl Rahner, who seemed to agree.

[Edward Schillibeeckx. Photo via Praemium Erasmianum Foundation]

Stop Thinking of Your Body in Terms of the Limits of Your Skin
Around this time I was also reading Rosemary Haughton's book, The Passionate God, in which she speaks of how people, things, ideas, and realities are in a dynamic state of exchange. She notes that there are various definitions of "the body of Christ," including the body of the man Jesus who was born and died; the Eucharist; the mystical body; and the church. She says these may have more to do with each other than we sometimes think, and that we have to stop thinking of our own bodies in terms of the limits of our skin.

[Rosemary Haughton photo, National Catholic Reporter]

After some reflection, I realized that there was a very different way to read the Christian gospels than I'd often assumed:  Let’s consider that the radical rabbi, Jesus, noticed that his teachings were having a deep effect on his followers, changing their understanding of themselves and their world, and also how they act in that world. They had internalized those teachings. So at the last supper, when he broke bread and said it was his body, and passes a cup saying it was his blood, this is a ritual to make more clear to them what he already knew had taken place: They had internalized his teaching, and in a way, him. The table ritual made this more clear in their consciousness. He was *in* them, and wanted this to become more explicit and conscious for them. What we ritualize and realize more fully becomes more real for us.

If we view his relationship with the disciples this way, then the empty tomb doesn’t mean Jesus is a resuscitated zombie with superpowers who can appear or disappear at will. It means the true location of his living self is not in a tomb with corpses. It’s inside of those who internalized his teachings, or whose lives already reflect them.

So the stranger on the road to Emmaus was not a resuscitated zombie corpse who either morphed his appearance to go unrecognized, or who used Jedi mind-tricks to cloud the disciples’ minds. Rather, it was probably just a stranger, but one who did for the disciples many of the familiar things that Jesus had done: He showed empathy for their sorrow and explained the scriptures to them to comfort them. When they broke bread with the stranger, as they had done so many times with Jesus, they realized they liked the stranger so much because he reminded them of their teacher. In spite of the cruel and traumatizing torture and execution of their teacher and friend, the stuff of Jesus was still available to them in the world, it seemed, even through strangers, like a gift from a merciful God.

When the disciples were gathered in the upper room, with windows and doors locked, Jesus did not enter the room like Caspar the friendly ghost. He was already inside the room (remember what happened at the last supper? This is my body, take and eat?). He was in them. His teachings and example had changed them. Much of the time in the room may have been spent in silence, but once the disciples started speaking, it’s easy to imagine that they would have heard in one another the influences of their friend and teacher.
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Maybe Not Your Average Christian Understanding?
If this is truly what happened, why don’t more Christians think this way? In fact, Christians for centuries have taken the stories both literally and figuratively. One has to grasp it at a literal level before reading it as analogy or metaphor. But most of the early Christian writers did interpret the texts as analogies for the spiritual life. So it’s not as if early Christians were blind to more figurative readings of the Last Supper, the empty tomb, the appearances in the upper room and on the road to Emmaus.

But because Christianity played leap-frog across cultures, leaping from ancient Israel to Rome especially, some of the figurative language and opportunities for interpreting the stories analogically may have been lost in translation.

The Appeal of a God of Power and Might
In addition, the more Christianity became centered in Rome and influenced by Roman emperors, the more appealing a powerful Jesus became: A miraculously resuscitated Jesus with super-powers, who ascends into heaven, taken literally. If you believe otherwise you are a heretic who might just be executed to teach a lesson to the rest of the multitudes.

Coming-of-Age & Transcending Literalism
In his book, Stories of God: An Unauthorized Biography, John Shea speaks of how not all religions are like this: Not all of them require the literalism, and in fact, many have coming-of-age rituals in which there is a kind of unmasking of the literal myth so that the emerging adult can move to a more mature understanding.  This is like what happens in western culture as children eventually stop taking the Santa Claus myth literally, and sometimes move toward realizing that we can all be generous and transcendent givers of gifts, with the spirit of Santa living in each of us.


Shea writes,

Many [so-called] primitive tribes construct situations of disenchantment to mark the entry into adulthood. The initiation rite for Hopi children is a good example. The rite centers around the kachinas, masked gods who visit the village. During the cultic initiation the kachinas tell the children secret stories, frighten them with ogre masks, and dance to entertain them. But the climax of the ceremony holds a surprise.

“The children are taken into a kiva (hut) to await a kachina dance - now a familiar event. They hear the kachinas calling as they approach the kiva. They witness the invitation extended from within the kiva for the dancing gods to enter. But to the children’s amazement, the kachinas enter without masks, and for the first time in their lives, the initiates discover that the kachinas are actually members of their own village impersonating the gods.”
[Shea's footnote here is to Sam D. Gill, “Disenchantment,” Parabola, Vol. 1 (Spring 1976), p.9.]

For Shea, if we go on taking the myths and stories too literally, then we are worshiping idols, and not embracing the transcendent mystery of sacred experience. This is very similar to what Paul Ricoeur wrote about regarding first and second naivete, like the Hopi children before the ritual (first naivete) and after the unmasking ritual (second naivete).

[Paul Ricouer]

This is not about a crushing disillusionment that results in a disbelief in Santa, disbelief in Jesus’ resurrection, and disbelief in God, but about achieving a deeper understanding and relationship to the stories than the merely literal.

Christianity's Failure at Coming-of-Age Rituals?
All of this made sense to me. But then consider Christianity: The main coming-of-age ritual is confirmation. Instead of any rite of disenchantment or unmasking, it seems that too many Christian churches simply enforce the masks and ask the emerging adult Christians to commit themselves with even greater fervor and responsibility to the program of evangelizing a too-literal faith where all the masks must remain in place on what have become idols. Many conservative Christian authority figures say that one must take the resurrection and the appearance on the road to Emmaus literally, or if not, then one is not really a believer, not really a member of the club, but merely an outsider, a disbeliever. If one persists too stubbornly in opposition to literal belief, one might be branded a heretic, an atheist, judged by other Christians as unworthy of salvation.

There are exceptions, of course. Episcopal Bishop John Shelby Spong doesn’t take things like resurrection or virgin birth too literally. John Dominic Crossan, author of The Historical Jesus (and many other excellent books) doesn’t either. But many Catholic bishops, cardinals and popes still tend to expect a virgin birth and a supernaturally resuscitated Jesus with super-powers, or if they don’t, they’re very clever at hiding it. Vatican officials criticize and scold (and occasionally interview, or interrogate) "naughty" theologians who stray a bit too far from the doctrinal path. If one questions the bodily resurrection, or the virgin birth of Jesus, or the perpetual virginity of Mary, one can be judged ineligible to teach at Catholic colleges and universities.

In Shakespeare’s Time?
In Shakespeare’s lifetime, and certainly his parents’ lifetime, heretics were burned at the stake. So what did people do if they began to question the literal meaning of Bible tales as the only true meaning? They learned to keep it to themselves or risk being executed as heretics. So a lack of evidence of heretical beliefs doesn’t mean few people were heretics. It just means that, of those whose opinions conflicted with official teaching, they had been terrorized by the church and their government into silence.
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So in these ways, my religious perspective about Christianity is different than that of certain other interpreters of Shakespeare. Many acknowledge that Shakespeare toyed with figurative reinterpretations of themes of death and resurrection, but the assumption is often that Shakespeare was a typical, conforming English Protestant who took the scripture stories literally but took creative liberties in his plays simply to entertain his audiences. English law limited the ability of theaters to enact stories from scripture or liturgy, so they assume that Shakespeare, whether a believer or not, allowed for religious influences in his plays only if it made for good entertainment. They seem to assume that there was a firewall between Shakespeare’s personal faith and institutional-religious allegiances, on the one hand, and his plays and poetry on the other.

Should we assume that Shakespeare was a very traditional Christian who took the Bible stories very literally, but who then exercised great creative freedom in his adaptation of religious themes and plots? Shakespeare retells resurrection stories in the following plays (and arguably more):
Much Ado about Nothing (pseudo-resurrection scheme that succeeds)
Romeo & Juliet (pseudo-resurrection scheme gone wrong)
Pericles (Jonah rebirth-from-sea motif)
Winter’s Tale (pseudo-resurrection scheme that succeeds)

In Hamlet, the prince is saved from the jaws of death at sea like Jonah, and survives capture by pirates instead of being swallowed by a fish; in some performances, Hamlet and Laertes wrestle in the graveyard in Ophelia’s grave, and both emerge again from that grave, enacting a kind of resurrection.

I have blogged before about striking scenes in Hamlet and Merchant of Venice that seem to retell the story of Jesus’ appearance on the road to Emmaus.

In Merchant, the disguised (and definitely flawed) Christ-figure is Portia: Instead of coming down from heaven like Jesus to do his saving work, she comes down from Belmont to do her saving work in the Venice courtroom, but even her husband doesn’t recognize her. Instead of a revelation in the breaking of the bread, as on the road to Emmaus, Portia is finally recognized in the tale of the breaking of her husband’s ring-vow, like Peter’s vow at the last supper that he would not deny Jesus (only to find that, in fact, Peter denies Jesus three times before Jesus’ death).

In Hamlet, the gravedigger is the unrecognized stranger, and the skull of Yorick, at first unrecognized. It turns out that this gravedigger was a friend of Yorick’s, beloved by the prince: Yoirick once figuratively baptized the gravedigger in a flagon of Rhenish wine, so Yorick, the gravedigger, and Hamlet are kindred spirits, court fools with insight and quick wit. Instead of recognition in the breaking of bread, one of the last supper actions, the gravedigger and Yorick’s skull are recognized in the gravedigger’s tale of poured wine (the *other* table-action at the last supper).

Witty Literalisms
In the Christian gospels, there are a number of stories that involve people taking Jesus too literally, and Jesus having to correct them, especially in the Gospel of John: Jesus talks to a woman at a well about "living water," and she takes him too literally and thinks he's talking about an aqueduct or indoor plumbing. Later, he tells the disciples, "I have food of which you do not know," and they think he's literally hiding some food. Jesus talks to Nicodemus about the importance of being "born again," and Nicodemus thinks he's talking about going back into his mother's womb. The gospel Jesus corrects them, over and over, hinting that perhaps the original meanings of certain aspects of the gospels were not to be taken literally, and that stories like these, repeated, prepare the reader or listener for a way of reading the resurrection and Pentecost that transcends the literal.

Shakespeare has moments like this in Hamlet:
- when Horatio takes Hamlet too literally after Hamlet says he thinks he sees his father;
- when Hamlet toys with Polonius regarding too-literal responses to Polonius' questions (What are you reading? / Words. / No, what is the matter? / What is the matter with whom? / etc.).
- when Claudius asks Hamlet how he "fares" (how are you?), and Hamlet reads the question as "what sort of fare are you eating?" - etc.

Shakespeare moves his audience in these ways to think about literal and more-than-merely-literal meanings. It's very possible that Shakespeare's personal bible reading and his hearing of scripture in church exposed him to these moments in scripture where people took Jesus too literally, and he corrected them - and that this influenced his toying with literalism in the play with Horatio, Polonius, and others. (Yes, being witty with language is a widely available experience, but in scripture reading and required church attendance, Shakespeare was regularly exposed to it.)

The Body of Christ, Christ as Head, & Monarchs as Heads of Bodies Politic
Many monarchs in European Christendom liked to think of themselves as enjoying divine right to rule, and as monarchs, being the head of the body politic even as Jesus was considered the head of his body, the church. So of course, English citizens longed for virtuous rulers who ruled with mercy and justice. In other words, they longed for truly Christian monarchs who took seriously, but not literally, the biblical imagery of Christ as the head of the church, and the church as the body of Christ. They wanted monarchs to be consistent with the metaphor. And of course, they were disappointed with the vices of kings, like the many affairs and wives of Henry VIII, his execution of wives, rumors of Elizabeth’s affairs, etc.

When Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, and Claudius want to know where Hamlet has put the body of Polonius, of course, it seems to me that this is an echo of the Christian resurrection tales in the gospels: The women find an empty tomb and wonder: Where have they put him? In the case of Jesus of the last supper, he has a new, living body in the church, so it matters little that the tomb is empty. Of course it’s empty. The true Jesus is to be found elsewhere, in those who live his teachings, or whose lives resemble his life.

But what of Polonius? Where is his body? What is his legacy? In Julius Caesar, Marc Antony notes, “The evil that men do lives after them”. Polonius has a son in France being spied upon by an employee of Polonius, soon to kill Hamlet in a duel, and a daughter soon to commit suicide. Polonius has not exactly left the world a better place.

Second Naivete Shakespeare
So passages such as these lead me to believe that Shakespeare’s understanding of scriptures had perhaps evolved beyond what Paul Ricoeur would call a first naivete, and that he no longer took the scriptural stories literally, or exclusively so.

[Paul Ricoeur, photo via University of Chicago Divinity School]
This transcending of the literal-only meanings may also have been nurtured by Shakespeare's playwriting, which the law restricted in ways that required the exclusion of certain religious references and explicit criticism of living government officials. These legal limits may have required Shakespeare to transcend the literal, to reach for analogies, so instead of writing explicitly about the foolish waste of Protestant-Catholic feuds that led to violence and revenge, he has a dying Mercutio say repeatedly of the feuding Montagues and Capulets, "A plague o' both your houses!" What Shakespeare could not say openly, explicitly, literally, he said through metaphor.

It’s also important to remember that the language of both Roman Catholic liturgy (church services), and of the Book of Common Prayer was often figurative, so for example, in the baptism rite, baptism is viewed metaphorically as related to Moses drawing the chosen people through the divided waters of the sea, etc.
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Who am I to suggest such things?
So who am I to interpret Hamlet in these ways? Do my experiences condition me to have legitimate insights about the play? Or do my biases blind me to other possibilities? There’s the rub.

I think that in the process of writing his plays and being a law-abiding church-attending citizen, Shakespeare’s work gave him opportunities to interpret scripture in ways that transcended the literal meanings or assumptions, and led him to creative exploration of many possibilities for understanding and retelling the tales in new contexts.

In Midsummer Night’s Dream, Theseus notes:
The poet's eye, in fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.

I believe that in reimagining scripture tales in new contexts, Shakespeare was considering how the transcendent mysteries of life might be present still in many stories, many contexts, and these necessarily transcended literal-only readings of scripture.

Many or most Shakespeare scholars I’ve come across who touch on matters of religion often seem to assume that Shakespeare must not have been a heretic or he would have announced it in his writing and been executed as such. Because he doesn’t make any such clear and unequivocal announcement of radical religious beliefs, many assume that he took scripture literally, that he believed in a God of Power and Might, a son Jesus who is supernaturally resuscitated, who appeared as a resuscitated corpse to his disciples after the crucifixion, and who has miraculous power beyond human imagining; they assume Shakespeare believed that, since Jesus ascended into heaven, the age of miracles being past. Many assume Shakespeare believed that the divine right of monarchs derives from this God of Power and Might; this heavenly Father sent a son to preach, work miraculous signs and wonders, and to die; then raised him up to triumph over all sin. They assume Shakespeare believed all of that because English Protestants were supposed to believe all that, regardless of what stories they imagined for the theater, for secular entertainment.

I beg to differ.

Of course, I could be wrong, and I could be applying a kind of confirmation bias, confirming my assumptions by looking for evidence in the plays that supports them. An unnamed gentleman in Hamlet says this regarding how listeners seem to interpret Ophelia’s mad speech:

She speaks much of her father; says she hears
There's tricks i' the world; and hems, and beats her heart;
Spurns enviously at straws; speaks things in doubt,
That carry but half sense: her speech is nothing,
Yet the unshaped use of it doth move
The hearers to collection; they aim at it,
And botch the words up fit to their own thoughts.

In my interpretations, thinking that Shakespeare may have moved beyond a first naivete in his understanding of scripture to what Ricoeur calls a second naivete - this might be merely my own projecting, botching up Shakespeare to fit my own thoughts of what I’d like him to be.

Or I might have some valid insights. I’m hoping for (and betting on) the latter.

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This week's post was about how I came to my understanding of how literally - or not - Shakespeare may have taken the bible, and as a related point, how literally or figuratively the biblical stories were meant to be understood.

As an addendum, for those interested, sometimes the rich and powerful have invested money in keeping Christianity's biblical texts interpreted more literally than figuratively:

Lyman Stewart (1840-1923), President of Union Oil, invested significant sums of money to publish a series of booklets called "The Fundamentals" (from which we get the term, "Fundamentalism") urging that people are saved by faith in a Jesus who was literally born of a virgin, whose very corpse was risen back to a new life, and who will quite literally come again at the end of time.

"The Fundamentals" has a grocery list of beliefs one must assent to in order to be saved, and none of these includes the biblical line, "whatever you do to the least of these, you do unto me." This makes it easier for rich oil company presidents to believe they are saved, it would seem, but doesn't help to advance an understanding of what the biblical stories originally meant, or how literally or figuratively they were meant to be taken.