Battenhouse's Authoritarian-Protestant Bias (part 12)

Of all well-known Protestant religious Shakespeare critics of the 20th century, Roy W. Battenhouse is, to me, troubling. He demonstrates broad familiarity with many sources and attends to details. But due either to a Protestant or an authoritarian bias (or both), he is determined to find more selfishness and sin in Prince Hamlet than even in Claudius.

Many of his Shakespeare essays are collected in Shakespearean Tragedy: Its Art and Its Christian Premises (1969). His chapter “Hamartia in Aristotle, Christian Doctrine, and Hamlet” (204-266) is helpful in a variety of ways. But he finds more sin than grace in each character, especially Hamlet, even where other scholars find traces of turning or redemption (250).

[L: Shakespearean Tragedy: Its Art and Its Christian Premises (1969). Image via Amazon.com. Fair use.
R: Shakespeare’s Christian Dimension (1994). Image via Google Books. Fair use. Both out of print, available used and in libraries.]

He views Hamlet’s love of Ophelia as “incestuous” (231); Hamlet is slanderous to call Claudius a “satyr” and his mother “bestial” (224), ignoring the incest theme’s allusion to Henry VIII’s claims about his first marriage. (Did Battenhouse, an Episcopal priest, wish to avoid addressing the embarrassing and troublesome historical fact of Henry’s first divorce?)

Battenhouse claims the ghost is from a pagan Hades more than from a Catholic Purgatory (239-40), ignoring the fact of Protestant-Catholic strife in Shakespeare’s England. Drawing on Freud, he finds Hamlet to have homosexual, narcissistic tendencies (233), confirming for him his sense of Hamlet’s sinfulness.

Battenhouse is good to scrutinize sins of the dead king (230) and Hamlet’s idolizing of his father (232), but is harsher in judging the prince than the usurper. For Battenhouse, those who find a redemption arc in the prince have been misled.

Is this merely due to a Protestant bias, the idea that after Adam’s fall, we are all depraved sinners (especially Hamlet), saved by faith alone (of which Hamlet displays too little, too late)?

His authoritarian bias is reminiscent of Elizabethan sermons admonishing the faithful to obey authorities. To Battenhouse, as to the Elizabethan church, killing even an unjust monarch might be among the worst of sins, as to them, God requires patient forbearance, even of tyranny.

Battenhouse is similarly more harsh in his judgment of Romeo and Juliet than he is of their feuding elders. He also edited a collection of essays by himself and others (whose views are close to his own) in Shakespeare’s Christian Dimension (1994). Essays by others on Romeo and Juliet that he includes (363-381) only reinforce his own view. The possibility that the feuding Montagues and Capulets might offer a veiled portrayal of feuding Protestants and Catholics is never considered, nor the young lovers as representing a flawed and fumbling hope for reconciliation of factions.

Are the plays so ambiguous as to support his reading? Or does Battenhouse abuse the powers of his own vast knowledge in service of his biases? (Or do I only think so because of my own biases?)

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When asked by students what Hamlet might have done differently that would be less sinful and more honorable in his eyes, Battenhouse says he offered his students that Hamlet might have
1) joined a monastery (245),
2) fled Denmark to await “evidence of misgovernment as might justify a military invasion” (246), or
3) “challenge Claudius to trial by combat” (246).

One can, perhaps, imagine the students of Battenhouse, perhaps exasperated that he was so negative about Hamlet and his options, asking this question.

Battenhouse admits that these would violate the needs of the play as a tragedy and is for speculative purposes only. But the options he offers are odd: A monastery? There is never a time when a prince might kill a murderous usurper to protect the interests of the kingdom's subjects?

And there are contraditions: A military invasion would bear a high cost in unnecessary casualties, far greater than the deaths of Polonius, Ophelia, Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, Gertrude, Laertes, Hamlet, and Claudius. Wouldn't this be more "sinful" in the eyes of a Christian?

And note that in his third option, challening Claudius to trial by combat, this assumes Claudius would accept and participate as an honest and honorable combattant in such a trial. But Claudius has proven he is not that sort of person at all.

So it's revealing that his students would ask, and equally revealing that he would give such a strange list, full of contradictions.

~~

For a similarly scrutinizing view of Battenhouse's harsh scrutiny
in Shakespearean Tragedy: Its Art and Its Christian Dimensions,
see also Sylvan Barnet's 1972 review in Renaissance Quarterly.
Here is an excerpt from that review:
"It is not too much to say that Battenhouse's study of the relation of suffering to sin tends to turn the heroes into thoroughly nasty persons. Those who believe that at least part of the pleasure we experience in witnessing tragedy is related to the presentation of human greatness will feel that most of the heroes are seriously diminished in this book." - Sylvan Barnet
Barnet, S. (1972). Roy W. Battenhouse. Shakespearean Tragedy: Its Art and Its Christian Premises.
Bloomington-London: Indiana University Press, 1969. 466 pp. $15.
Renaissance Quarterly, 25(1), 109-110. doi:10.2307/2859643

For a (kinder?) review of Battenhouse as editor of Shakespeare’s Christian Dimension, see
Margaret J. Arnold's review in Comparative Drama
Vol. 29, No. 4 (Winter 1995-96), pp. 529-532 (4 pages)
https://www.jstor.org/stable/41153782
~~

Series on Religious (and a few other) Biases in Shakespeare Scholarship:
1. Biases & Assumptions Influence What We Notice, Seek, or Neglect - 11 January, 2022
https://pauladrianfried.blogspot.com/2022/01/biases-assumptions-influence-what-we.html

2. Religious Bias in Shakespeare/Hamlet Scholarship - 18 January, 2022
https://pauladrianfried.blogspot.com/2022/01/part-2-factors-contributing-to.html

3. Victors Wrote the Histories of Shakespeare and Francis of Assisi - 25 January, 2022
https://pauladrianfried.blogspot.com/2022/01/victors-wrote-history-of-shakespeare.html

4. Biblical Seeds of Secular Shakespeare Bias - 1 February, 2022
https://pauladrianfried.blogspot.com/2022/02/biblical-seeds-of-secular-shakespeare.html

5. Catholic Bias in Simon Augustus Blackmore - 8 February, 2022
https://pauladrianfried.blogspot.com/2022/02/catholic-bias-in-simon-augustus.html

6. Nietzschean & Christian-Mythical Bias in G. Wilson Knight - 15 February, 2022
https://pauladrianfried.blogspot.com/2022/02/nietzschean-christian-mythical-bias-in.html

7. Roland Frye's Protestant Bias - 22 February, 2022
https://pauladrianfried.blogspot.com/2022/02/roland-fryes-protestant-bias.html

8. Gatekeeping and Religious Turns in Shakespeare Scholarship - 1 March, 2022
https://pauladrianfried.blogspot.com/2022/03/gatekeeping-and-religious-turns-in.html

9. Honigmann, Hammerschmidt−Hummel, and Moses' Shoes - 8 March, 2022
https://pauladrianfried.blogspot.com/2022/03/taking-off-shoes-in-presence-of.html

10. Protestant Bias in Arthur McGee's 1987 book, "The Elizabethan Hamlet" - 15 March, 2022
https://pauladrianfried.blogspot.com/2022/03/protestant-bias-in-arthur-mcgees-1987.html

11. Catholic Bias in Clare Asquith's 2005 book, "Shadowplay" - 22 March, 2022
https://pauladrianfried.blogspot.com/2022/03/catholic-bias-in-clare-asquiths-2005.html

12. Protestant and authoritarian bias in Roy W. Battenhouse - 29 March, 2022
https://pauladrianfried.blogspot.com/2022/03/battenhouses-authoritarian-protestant.html


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Disclaimer: If and when I quote or paraphrase bible passages or mention religion in many of my blog posts, I do not intend to promote any religion over another, nor am I attempting to promote religious belief in general; only to point out how the Bible and religion may have influenced Shakespeare, his plays, and his age.
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