The Black Rubric and Hamlet’s Feminizing of a Distant, Indifferent Divine

Consider two moments in Hamlet when it is made explicit: Maybe God is not paying attention to human suffering?

THE FIRST is when the First Player tells the revenge tale of Priam’s death at the hands of Pyrrhus (2.2). Hecuba, Priam’s wife, watches. [See note #1 below: "Who in Shakespeare's England was like Hecuba, witness to a brutal killing of a loved one?"]

The First Player says that the “synod” of the gods (like bishops and cardinals?) should take away the powers of the goddess Fortune (like an excommunicated Elizabeth I?), breaking her wheel, and “bowling” her “down the hill of heaven, / As low as to the fiends!”

First Player:
But if the gods themselves did see her [Hecuba] then, [/...]
The instant burst of clamour that she made
(Unless things mortal move them not at all)
Would have made milch [milk] the burning eyes of heaven....

[In a fresco (circa 1532-1534) by Giulio Romano (1499–1546), the image above depicts the gods overcoming the titans. Public domain, via Wikimedia. More on this below. See #3.]

Heaven can seem indifferent. Even a crucified Jesus quotes Ps. 22, “my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”

But even more, this moment in Hamlet is curious for its feminizing of the gods: Goddesses can bear children and lactate; but male gods must be moved by pity, and (regardless of the explicit gender of certain gods or goddesses) the tears of their “burning eyes” must be turned to milk.

THE SECOND explicit moment like this comes when Laertes later makes a similar remark in 4.5 after witnessing the madness of his sister: “Do you see this, O God?” (Are you even paying attention?)

This brings to mind at least three things:

1. Bernardo has the first line in the play: “Who’s there?” (Who’s paying attention, here, in the script of the play, in the audience, or in the heavens?). I’ve argued that Bernardo’s Christian name comes from Bernard of Clairvaux, a reformer in a monastic order with a significant presence in England before the dissolution of monasteries. (Read more here, and here, and here, and also here and here.) Bernard was said to have had a vision or dream in which, at prayer, he drank of the milk of the Virgin Mary (a common theme in medieval art).

Milk of heaven in a revenge play?

2. This idea of an indifferent, remote God brings to mind the “Black Rubric,” a passage in The Book of Common Prayer. While it took Jesus’ words at the Last Supper as mere metaphor, it took more literally the Ascension story where, after the resurrection appearances, Jesus is said to ascend into heaven. It claimed: Jesus is not in Eucharist, not in your church or its bread and wine. His body is in heaven. (So take the Ascension literally, not that Last Supper stuff.) A more remote God.

[More below: See BLACK RUBRIC]

3. The image above is from a fresco by Giulio Romano, “The Fall of the Giants.” Romano is the only Renaissance artist that Shakespeare names (as a sculptor in The Winter’s Tale, initially often assumed to be a painter misidentified as a sculptor, but correctly identified later by German scholar Gregor Sarrazin (1857-1915). (It's interesting how it took a relative outsider, a German scholar, to correct the false assumptions of English academics....)[2]

Maria Maurer (University of Tulsa) has described the fresco as created for “a space in which courtly masculinity was constructed and performed.” [3]

Yet the First Player urges that these hyper-masculine gods on Romano’s ceiling need tears of milk as they witness the destructive consequences of human “madness” like revenge.

Shakespeare’s Bible didn’t say “Vengeance is God’s, so avenge!” It said (in the "Our Father" or Lord's Prayer, for example) be merciful, like God. When Hamlet is nearing the end of his vengefulness, he kills Claudius, but not Laertes. They exchange forgiveness, and Hamlet echoes the “Let Be” of Mary to the angel, or of Jesus to John the Baptist. [4]

A November, 1982 NYTimes article notes, “A Danish legend dating back to the 12th century held that Hamlet was actually a woman whose gender had been concealed by her mother to protect Hamlet's claim to the throne.” Or perhaps the case with Shakespeare’s Hamlet is that patriarchies don’t take well to feminizing wordplay about gods, monarchs and princes, so to cope, they literalize/reify assertions of so-called feminine features? [5]

~~~~~~~~~ More on BLACK RUBRIC (and how God might be viewed as present or near in the play):

Does God seem remote throughout all of Hamlet, or does this change as things go along?

More on the closeness or remoteness of God in Hamlet:

Hamlet contains traditional references to the presence of God, including references to Eucharist, but some may be viewed as parody, sarcasm, or used in deception:

Marcellus:
Some say that ever, 'gainst that season comes
Wherein our Saviour's birth is celebrated,
The bird of dawning singeth all night long;
And then, they say, no spirit dare stir abroad,
The nights are wholesome, then no planets strike,
No fairy takes, nor witch hath power to charm,
So hallow'd and so gracious is the time. (1.1).

Horatio says he only half believes him. And when asked if it's Horatio approaching, Horatio jokes, "A piece of him." This sounds like it may be a joke about the Eucharistic controversy between Catholics and Protestants. But in general, Marcellus is speaking about Christmas and the incarnation, of Jesus, "Emanuel," or "God-with-us," not remote.

In 1.2, when Horatio refers to Hamlet as his "lord" and himself as Hamlet's "servant ever," Hamlet replies, "I'll change that name with you," meaning prince Hamlet should be the servant, and Horatio, his lord. This echoes Jesus in the gospels, bidding the disciples who wish to be first to be like servants to all, and Jesus washing their feet to demonstrate service.

In 1.5, Horatio tells Hamlet how it is strange to hear the ghost’s voice; Hamlet replies, "And therefore as a stranger give it welcome," alluding to St. Paul’s advice to welcome strangers for in doing so some have greeted angels unaware (Heb 13:2), and to Gen 18, where Abraham and Sarah welcome three visitors. By way of the stranger - and the visitation of angels - and by way of the generous hospitality of those who greet the strangers, God is close, present, not remote.

Hamlet’s “Hic et ubique?” (1.5) is a playful, ironic and perhaps ominous question attributing to the ghost an omnipresence that Christianity normally attributed to God and to Jesus’ presence in many places, in Eucharist. In a similar statement of God’s omnipresence, in Acts 17:28, St. Paul quotes Epimenides, “For in him we live and move and have our being.”

Hamlet in 2.2 welcomes the players and scolds Polonius for his lack of hospitality:
Use every man after his
desert, and who should scape whipping? Use them after your own
honour and dignity. The less they deserve, the more merit is in
your bounty. Take them in.

In 3.1, the nunnery scene, Polonius wants Ophelia to be reading a book when Hamlet first sees him, so that she will look like the Virgin Mary, reading a book of psalms, as illustrated in many prayer books of the time (see previous post on this topic, here, with two key sources). This is not merely a reference to a traditional Bible tale about the nearness of God in the incarnation and in Mary's womb, but also about Polonius and Hamlet's knowledge of that tale through familiarity of images in prayer books. In this sense, Hamlet's remark that Ophelia should get herself to a nunnery is perhaps not, or not merely, an expression of Hamlet's misogyny, but an expression that she and her father have abused the image of Mary at the Annunciation in order to deceive him, yet another thing about Denmark that is "rotten" and "out of joint."

- In 4.2 and 4.3, the confusion and anxiety of Claudius, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern about the lost body of Polonius echoes that of the women at the tomb in Jn 20:13 about the missing corpse of Jesus. Does the empty tomb signify that God is not close? Or does it signify that he's out, on the loose, in the disciples who were changed by him, and in the stranger on the road to Emmaus, or Elsinore?

God also seems present in Hamlet’s belief that God (“Providence”) was with him on his Jonah-like voyage to England when he discovered Claudius’ letter ordering Hamlet’s execution, and with him when the pirates spared his life. Instead of being saved from the belly of a fish, he is saved from a ship bound for his execution, and from pirates as well. Hamlet indicates this in his letter to Horatio (4.6) and his later conversation with him (5.2).

In 5.1, Hamlet and Horatio, two Danes on the road to Elsinore, will greet the stranger-gravedigger who reminds Hamlet of Yorick, echoing the gospel tale where two disciples on the road to Emmaus greet a stranger who reminds them of, and somehow represents the presence of, Jesus.

As a revenge play, one might argue that Hamlet is about revenge as a corruption that comes when one doesn't trust that vengeance is God's: All of Hamlet's mistakes (such as killing Polonius, and being unnecessarily harsh to Ophelia, and sending Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to their deaths) come because Hamelt is corrupted by revenge. Instead of trusting in God ("Let be"), the revenger believes he must take things into his own hands because God obviously isn't doing enough. But the play doesn't argue in favor of being passive in the face of injustice: Hamlet does have to wrestle with the idea of what exactly is his responsibility in the face of his uncle's crime of killing his father, the king. Suffer slings and arrows of outrageous fortune? Or take up arms? Hamlet's response is sloppy, corrupted by "sin," and results in many seemingly needless deaths. Instead of embodying the love, mercy, and justice of God, Hamlet descends into madness because he assumes he must be the scourge, a revenger. He ascends from madness slowly after the sea-voyage and graveyard scene, and comes to embody not only the vengeance of God toward Claudius, but also the mercy of God toward Laertes. Although many of these echoes of scripture's assertions of God's presence are often missed in the play, it might be argued that they occur as often, or more, than moments of doubt in God's presence, or at least that the movement of the play is toward embodiment of divine qualities like forgiveness, or where mercy and justice meet and kiss.

~~~~~~ NOTES:
[1] Who in Shakespeare's England was like Hecuba, witness to a brutal killing of a loved one?
- There were many executed in Shakespeare's England, including Catholics during the reign of Elizabeth, Protestants during the reign of Mary I, Catholics during the reigns of Henry VIII and his son Edward.
- There were many wives, husbands, siblings, relatives, neighbors and friends who watched brutal executions, people burned at the stake, or drawn and quartered, dragged, hung till nearly dead, then cut open while still living, to see their own intestines removed before their eyes, and then various organs.
- Were there any gods watching? Bishops and cardinals in "synod"? Royals and nobles? Were tears of their burning eyes turned to milk?
- The killings of Catholics and Protestants may have seemed to the common people to resemble revenge killings: You kill our Catholics? We kill your Protestants.
You kill our Protestants? We will kill your Catholics.
- To the English, this back-and-forth rhythm may have resembled the rhythms of revenge in Greek tragedy.
- Plays could not speak openly about state-executions, but they could speak in the language of Greek Tragedy to express grief and anxiety about the state of England.

[2] Some Shakespeare scholars, among them "anti-Stratfordians" (who think Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, was the true writer of Shakespeare's plays), think that there are signs of Shakespeare's awareness of Romano's works in a number of the plays, but they assume that this was based on de Vere's travels to the continent, and not on second-hand information. 
[See "The Ten Restless Ghosts of Mantua: Shakespeare's Specter Lingers Over the Italian City: Part Two--Castiglione and the Gonzaga Family of Mantua," by John Hamill, Fall 2003, Shakespeare Oxford Newsletter (Vol. 39, Issue 4), Shakespeare Oxford Society.]
They need to assume that Shakespeare was not for a time perhaps considering study for the priesthood on the continent during his "lost years," so much of the Oxfordian's arguments rest on certain old assumptions about the son of the glover in Stratford whose name is usually associated with the plays and poems.

[3] See "The Palazzo del Te and the Spaces of Masculinity in Early Modern Italy" by Maria Maurer, 2012: https: he_palazzo_del_te_and_the_spaces_of_masculinity_in_early_modern_italy="" www.academia.edu=""

[4] Hamlet is clearly not a good guy in a white hat who can do no wrong. He is very mean to Ophelia, and he accidentally and foolishly kills Polonius, thinking it's Claudius. But he moves toward mercy and forgiveness, and away from revenge, in the end. In doing so, he moves toward a more feminine kind of masculinity, as Laertes might put it. Laertes thinks his tears are a sign of the feminine in himself, and is ashamed of them in 4.7 at news of Ophelia's death:

Laertes:
Too much of water hast thou, poor Ophelia,
And therefore I forbid my tears; but yet
It is our trick; nature her custom holds,
Let shame say what it will. When these are gone,
The woman will be out. (4.7)

For more on this shift in the play and in the character of Hamlet, see this post, and also the later part of this post on "Anagnorisis (& some peripeteia) in Hamlet."

[5] WHY NOT A WOMAN AS HAMLET? By Leslie Bennetts, Nov. 28, 1982.
https://www.nytimes.com/1982/11/28/theater/why-not-a-woman-as-hamlet.html

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