Reactions to R. Chris Hassel, Jr.'s "Painted Women: Annunciation Motifs in Hamlet"

[MORE THAN A PASSING RESEMBLANCE? Was Freud reincarnated as Brian Blessed, who played the Ghost of Hamlet's Father in Branagh's 1996 Hamlet? YOU DECIDE!]

I had planned to blog this week about whether Horatio benefits from gratitude or regret (or whether he is more simply a foil for Hamlet), and I still plan to blog on that topic soon.

But I’m always looking for new books and articles to read about Shakespeare, Hamlet, and religious issues in the Early Modern period, and I came across the article, “Painted Women: Annunciation Motifs in Hamlet” by R. Chris Hassel Jr. It was published in the journal, Comparative Drama (Volume 32, Number 1, Spring 1998, pp. 47-84). I'll summarize some favorite ideas and use his essay as a spring-board for some of my own.

I have been wrestling with Hassel’s insights, and there are many. As I’ve noted before in light of work by Katherine Goodland and Ruben Espinosa, when Polonius gives a prayer book to Ophelia, he wants her to appear like the Virgin Mary in the Annunciation as depicted in art of the period, as holding a prayer book, especially in prayer books and books of psalms. This is a key scene for Hassel who would then like to read Hamlet as a twisted version of the Angel Gabriel: If Ophelia is Mary, to complete the Annunciation image, he figures Hamlet must be a Gabriel. I'm not so sure, but if anything, Hamlet seems an anti-Gabriel, speaking of "no more marriages" and asking why Ophelia would even think of breeding more sinners.


[Annunciation, by Leonardo da Vinci, circa 1472, Uffizi Gallery, Florence, Italy]

I think the Annunciation allusion is quickly hijacked by an allusion to Suzannah and the Corrupt Elders, as I've written in the past; in the Annunciation paintings, we don’t have two corrupt authority figures who are eavesdropping on the girl, but in Hamlet and in the Suzannah tale, we do. So as in the Prayer Scene, where Claudius is a dark parody of the Agony in the Garden, and Hamlet a dark parody of David sparing Saul, we have clashing biblical references that seem to tell us, this is not a Virgin Mary-Annunciation scene, nor is it a Suzannah tale, but a darker twist on both.

Hassel misses the Suzannah echo, but he has many other remarkable insights:


Altar Curtain or Rood Screen: Gertrude's Closet?
His discussion of the Annunciation motif made me realize that the scene with Hamlet and Gertrude in her closet carries hints of the Annunciation motif as well:
—There is a woman (who in this case is already a mother);
—there is a supernatural figure (a ghost of the father instead of an angel-messenger from a father-god);
—and a son (not Jesus in the womb of the virgin, but Hamlet, already born and grown, and his mother recently wed in what authorities in Shakespeare’s time would consider an incestuous marriage).
—In the Annunciation tale, the angel comforts Mary and tells her not to fear;
—in the closet scene, the ghost tells Hamlet to comfort his mother. Yet Hamlet’s words show that he certainly fears the ghost, and the ghost has no words of comfort for him.

Hassel does not discuss the Queen’s closet scene in this way, but his discussion of the nunnery scene made me begin to think it seems there is something there worth further exploration.

Hassel also speaks of people hiding behind curtains. Many readers will know of the old Catholic practice of having a priest, behind a screen, speak the words of consecration, followed by a dramatic reveal of the host marked by the ringing of bells. Hassel claims interestingly that there may be some connection between the eavesdropping fathers in the nunnery scene, and/or the eavesdropping Polonius behind the arras, and the consecrating priest. He says that Polonius is not a Christ figure, but as the sacrifice of the mass has Jesus as a sacrificial victim, Polonius as victim may be a parody of the mass.

This is followed in the play by concerns about “where is the body?” which I believe echoes the women at the tomb:

John 20:11-18 1599 Geneva Bible 
11 But Mary stood without at the sepulcher weeping: and as she wept, she bowed herself into the sepulcher,
12 And saw two Angels in white, sitting, the one at the head, and the other at the feet, where the body of Jesus had lain.
13 And they said unto her, Woman, why weepest thou? She said unto them, They have taken away my Lord, and I know not where they have laid him.

There is similar confusion about the location of the corpse of Polonius, but it's like a dark Keystone Cops parody of Jn 20:11-18.

When told that Rome was wrong and that Eucharist is not a real presence but merely a symbol, some Catholics in Reformation England may have wondered, "Where have they taken him?" Where is the body? And if the body of Christ, the church, is divided by schism, then where is the body? How do you find the community and communion of the sacred?


[Kate Winslet as Ophelia, 1996, Dir. Branagh]

Or the Confessional Screen?
But it occurred to me that the nunnery scene may be more a parody of the confessional screen than of the altar curtain as Hassel claims, with the corrupt, eavesdropping fathers as a dark parody of the Roman Catholic sacrament of penance. Besides the Eucharistic controversy being a concern of Shakespeare’s age (which Jay Zysk’s book, Shadow and Substance explores), radical changes in the sacrament of confession were also a concern of the time (which Sarah Beckwith explores in Shakespeare and the Grammar of Forgiveness).

If we take the nunnery scene as a dark parody of Catholic penance, with corrupt fathers hiding behind the confessional screen, then some similarities emerge:
—In confession, sin is the sickness, the priest listens as the sinner freely confesses, and the priest offers absolution (forgiveness) and penance (some actions to embody a spirit of repentance).
—In the nunnery scene, Hamlet’s madness is the sickness. But instead of Hamlet freely confessing his sins to a priestly father, the corrupt fathers are spying on him against his wishes, and there is no forgiveness, nor healing, life-reorienting penance.

In the 1996 Branagh-directed film of Hamlet, after Laertes leaves in 1.3 and tells Ophelia to remember what he has told her, she says it is locked in her heart, and only he, her brother Laertes, has the key; but Polonius immediately violates that oath of secrecy between his children, like a state spymaster demanding that a priest break his oath of confessional silence. The scene in the film seems to include a confessional and privacy screen; Ophelia is being forced by her father to confess against her will and to breaking her oath of secrecy to her brother. Forced confessions like this, or eavesdropping without consent, would be considered quite unchristian in Shakespeare's time, and could be contrasted against the free confessions of Laertes and Horatio to each other in the last act.


"All my sins remembered": Sarcasm or Sincerity?
Hassel also inspires for me a question of how to interpret Hamlet’s first words to Ophelia in the nunnery scene, “Nymph, in thy orisons, be all my sins remembered.” Hassel’s reading suggests that Hamlet may smell a rat right away when he sees Ophelia with the prayer book, so even his first line is a sarcastic reference that echoes and parodies the Catholic “Hail Mary” prayer, with its ending, “pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death.”

I don’t see the sarcasm as a likely reading of that line, because Hamlet seems happy to see Ophelia until she gives back his letters, and then there is a strong shift in his tone. But the connection Hassel makes between Ophelia’s line and the ending of the “Hail Mary” is a good one.

Paying Attention to Freud & Sex More Than Purgatory
Hassel notes,
Hamlet seems in his anger and confusion about the concupiscence of both women in his life to want some sort of perpetual chastity for both of them: the nunnery (five times called for) for
Ophelia, and abstinence for Gertrude, who might "Assume a
virtue" even if she does not possess it (3.4.160). Hamlet wants a
chaste mother and a virginal lover, but he misogynistically distrusts either possibility.


[Ziggy Freud defended his nasty addiction to smoking phallic symbols, saying, "Sometimes a Cigar is Just a Cigar." Right.]

That Hamlet treats Ophelia and his mother very badly certainly seems to manifest misogyny. How many tens of thousands of living Shakespeare fans have said so? His harshness to Ophelia in the nunnery and mousetrap scenes, and his rant comparing his idealized father to his “moor” of an uncle, seems nothing short of madness, as well as racist to modern readers and viewers.

And yet audiences of Shakespeare’s time would not have lost sight of the usurping regicidal uncle and his incestuous marriage, committing the same kind of sin that Henry VIII claimed he wished to repent from in divorcing his first wife. In attempting to fight the evils of Claudius, Hamlet has been tempted, and has descended into a kind of madness of sin. He is no longer the servant-prince he appears to be in 1.2 when Horatio calls him his “lord” and offers himself to Hamlet as “your servant ever,” and Hamlet says he would change those names (lord/servant) with Horatio, and that he would rather have the guards act out of their mutual love than duty. He seems a nice guy, but descends.


Freud obviously didn't believe in purgatory

Like countless other Shakespeare scholars, Hassel notes how Hamlet protests too much about the sexuality of Gertrude and Ophelia, a valid point.

But it seems that, in their efforts to conform to scholarly trends (how often do we need to be told that Hamlet tries too hard to control Ophelia and Gertrude's sexuality?), some ignore a basic premise of the play: Hamlet has seen what he thinks is the ghost of his father. He had idealized his father, but learned that this same father seems to be suffering terribly in purgatory for sins he committed while alive. The ghost never names his own sins, but instead names the sins of Gertrude and Claudius, which include lust and adultery.

After the harrowing meeting with the ghost, Hamlet may have a heightened sense of the danger that sexual sins pose to one's immortal soul. He may feel he no longer has the luxury of assuming that perhaps purgatory and hell are superstitious fictions and that he and others should simply eat, drink, have sex, and be merry. He's had a visitor from the other side who seems proof of the consequences an afterlife can bring, and now he has, as he puts it in 3.1,
...the dread of something after death,
The undiscover'd country from whose bourn
No traveller returns...

So if Hamlet has glimpsed the punishment he never would have dreamed that his father would suffer, then it only makes sense that he might want to spare the two women he loves most, Ophelia and Gertrude, from a terrible fate after death. The ghost makes him crazy in a quest to get Ophelia and Gertrude to repent of sex, to avoid sexual sin.

For Hamlet to heed the ghost and *not* try to save Ophelia and Gertrude from a similar fate would certainly be unfeeling negligence on his part. One doesn’t have to believe in heaven, hell, or purgatory to admit that, within the fiction of the play, this makes sense.

Why Choose Sex When You Could Choose Purgatory?
You may ask: Since the specter is an obvious part of the play, as well as the question of his origin (hell or purgatory), why would so many scholars (with certain exceptions, like Stephen Greenblatt of Hamlet in Purgatory fame) spend so little time on Hamlet's traumatic glimpse of punishment in an afterlife, and so much time on his sexual preoccupations?

Here's my hunch. It's like the adage, "Write what you know." Sex is much more ordinary, as is the experience of having another person be too controlling in a relationship. Many people experience those things, including (gasp!) Shakespeare scholars. Sex is also more fun. But far fewer have encountered specters from the Other Side, or would ever want to admit it. (Full disclosure: I have not, and I don't take heaven, hell, or purgatory literally, but if the ghost of a relative had visited me, my best friend, and some of the local police, I might be hesitant to tell the tale when discussing Shakespeare and Hamlet.)

To paraphrase Hamlet in 3.1, scholarly peer pressure doth make cowards of us all. (Or at least most of us who want to get published in reputable journals.)

Freud: "Our unconscious does not believe in its own death, it behaves as if it were immortal. We cannot imagine our own death and when we attempt to do so we can perceive that we are in fact still spectators." [Link to a great piece on Freud at the end of his life, and on religion]
But we can imagine sex. So maybe that's why some scholars write more about that. Write what you know.

It’s easier to say that Hamlet wishes for Ophelia to remain a virgin and for his mother to return to a virginal state, and that he has major Oedipal issues, than to deal with the messy business of what he must do for those he loves most after his vision of his father, supposedly on a very brief break from purgatory.

In their enthusiasm to embrace Freudian ideas like countless other Shakespeare scholars, perhaps too many neglect the text at its most literal level, with a fiction of a supernatural specter of unknown origin, perhaps the ghost of Hamlet's father, and the possibilities of hell, purgatory, and heaven (even as fictions, but fictions in the text that need to be attended to), in favor of misogyny and Oedipal diagnoses that are certainly present, but not the whole story.

Which is not to say Hamlet is not a misogynist ass. Especially before the sea voyage. Of course he is. I talked to my therapist about it, and we agreed. But the fiction of the ghost points to hell or purgatory, so we neglect that at our own risk.

Not that scholars would go to hell for neglecting it (maybe some would; I don't know), but you know what I mean.

I don't personally believe in a literal heaven, hell, or purgatory. But as the man said, there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy. Maybe there *is* a hell for some  Shakespeare scholars, where they get to watch all the plays, but people forget their lines, mispronounce words, and ad-lib extra stuff on the spot. Maybe at all the best parts in the play, someone in a nearby seat insists on discussing Foucault or Derrida. That might be a thing. A hellish thing.


Hamlet's Reason vs. God's Inscrutable Will
Hassel articulates Hamlet’s problem as a lack of faith in Providence and too much faith in his own reason:
“Hamlet's extreme, indeed impossible moral scrupulousness manifests his distrust of God's Providence in the matter of the fall and original sin. Hamlet cannot or will not reconcile himself to breeding or to having been bred in imperfection. He abhors the mortality of human conception in the doing, in the delivering, and in the child that is delivered. If Ophelia, Gertrude, and all women, are breeders of sinners, Hamlet is inevitably part of the brood and the breeding.” (64)

Later, he notes,
Perplexed and disgusted by these fallen creatures in a fallen
creation, Hamlet rejects the traditional Christian scheme of fall
and redemption. He refuses to reconcile his will and reason to the
inscrutable will of God. (74)

This is true, with a few exceptions: When he kills Polonius, he makes a strange acclamation of faith:
“I do repent: but heaven hath pleased it so, To punish me with this and this with me, That I must be their scourge and minister.” This seems a moment of recognition, reconciling his mistake with the inscrutable will of God. And later, after the sea voyage, Hamlet does finally reconcile his will and that of Providence, as Hassel later notes.


Let the Verb-God, "I-Am-Who-Am," Be
Hassel also notes the Marian aspect of Hamlet’s “Let be” to Horatio in the last scene, marking another embodiment of Hamlet’s turning.

Although I had a few reservations on some points of Hassel’s arguments, overall his essay was most thought-provoking and helpful; I recommend it highly.

“Painted Women: Annunciation Motifs in Hamlet” by R. Chris Hassel Jr.
Comparative Drama (Volume 32, Number 1, Spring 1998, pp. 47-84.

R. Chris Hassel Jr. is also the author of Shakespeare's Religious Language: A Dictionary, which has received some very positive reviews.