Protestant Bias in Arthur McGee's 1987 book, "The Elizabethan Hamlet" (Part 10: Religious Bias in Shakespeare Scholarship)

Arthur McGee’s book, The Elizabethan Hamlet, was first published in 1987, 14 years before Stephen Greenblatt’s Hamlet in Purgatory. The two books could not be more different in their conclusions, although they share the idea that scholarship should be based in part on solid historical research. Greenblatt strives to recover manifestations of Roman Catholic purgatory traditions and their meaningful role, more than merely a means for priests to coerce people to part with their money. McGee does not.

[Images via Yale University Press. Fair use.]

McGee assumes
- that the ghost is a demon in disguise, the official Protestant view.
- that the ghost wore roses on his shoes, perhaps with hairy satyr legs to signal to audiences that he’s from hell, not purgatory.
- that early audiences were so thoroughly Protestant, they would not have tolerated a play that left open the possibility that the ghost might be from purgatory.
- that as there are many examples of anti-Catholic plays of the period, Shakespeare’s Hamlet must have been in the same tradition.

McGee ignores Shakespeare’s favorable portrayals of Franciscans. He downplays any possibility that Hamlet has had a positive transformation during his sea voyage to England and premature return with the help of pirates, as well as during the graveyard scene. He associates jesters like Yorick (and occasionally like Hamlet) with vice and sin, stock figures.
It is as if McGee chooses to ignore the continuing Protestant-Catholic strife in England during Shakespeare's lifetime, the spying and executions of Catholics for treason, and the Catholic assassination plots against Elizabeth, and that Elizabethan control over playhouses was totalitarian and absolute. It is an unrealistic and misleading view.

The book is not without insight on topics such as Ophelia’s owl and baker’s daughter remarks. But instead of considering that Ophelia feels guilt for being ungenerous to the Hamlet who came to her door like a beggar, as in the baker tale, McGee claims the tale was used by beggar-Friars to get women to give money and often sex. McGee assumes Ophelia is Catholic, perhaps a victim of incest at the hands of Polonius and Laertes.

This is a refreshing change from views of Polonius that are too favorable, but not necessarily supported by the text. As much as writers like Simon Blackmore have a heavy-handed Catholic bias, McGee’s book has a heavy-handed Protestant bias, oversimplifying Hamlet as an easily-decoded moral allegory in which the prince is deceived by a revenge-demon and tricked into killing his uncle and being damned.

Some of the essential power of the play comes in part because it never fully resolves whether the ghost was from purgatory, or a demon in disguise. McGee’s reading of Hamlet is too flat and oversimplified, much less interesting than the play itself.

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Description of the book by its publisher, Yale University Press:
This original and provocative reinterpretation of Hamlet presents the play as the original audiences would have viewed it--a much bleaker, stronger, and more deeply religious play than it has usually been assumed to be. Arthur McGee draws a picture of a Devil-controlled Hamlet in the damnable Catholic court of Elsinore, and he shows that the evil natures of the Ghost and of Hamlet himself were understood and accepted by the Protestant audiences of the day.

Using material gleaned from an investigation of play-censorship, McGee offers a comprehensive discussion of the Ghost as Demon. He then moves to Hamlet, presenting him as satanic, damned as revenger in the tradition of the Jacobean revenge drama. There are, he shows, no good ghosts, and Purgatory, whence the Ghost came, was reviled in Protestant England. The Ghost's manipulation extends to Hamlet's fool/madman role, and Hamlet's soliloquy reveals the ambition, conscience, and suicidal despair that damn him. With this viewpoint, McGee is able to shed convincing new light on various aspects of the play. He effectively strips Ophelia and Laertes of their sentimentalized charm, making them instead chillingly convincing, and he works through the last act to show damnation everywhere. In an epilogue, he sums up the history of criticism of Hamlet, demonstrating the process by which the play gradually lost its Elizabethan bite. Appendixes develop aspects of Ophelia.
https://yalebooks.co.uk/display.asp?k=9780300039887
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Two reviews of the book:

Review by GYÖRGY E. SZÖNYI
in Comparative Drama, Vol. 25, No. 2 (Summer 1991): https://www.jstor.org/stable/41153512

Review by Alastair Fowler in the London Review of Books in 1987:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v11/n05/alastair-fowler/undecidability 

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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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Thanks for reading!
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