Hamlet, Footwashing, Maundy Thursday, Hobbits, and Revelation

Echoes of Maundy Thursday in Hamlet (and Hobbits):

[Image: Screen capture from YouTube clip of The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003), directed by Peter Jackson, Warner Bros. based on the book by J.R.R. Tolkien. Fair use.]

[UPDATED 26 March, 2026]
Maundy Thursday (or Holy Thursday, 2 April, 2026) begins what the Catholic Church calls the Triduum (Paschal or Easter Triduum). 

“Maundy” comes from the Latin word for “command,” so Maundy Thursday gets its name from the Latin words once used at the opening of the Thursday service during Holy Week, and the gospel in which Jesus commands his disciples to love and serve others as he loved and served them. 

It includes a ritual remembrance of Jesus washing the disciples’ feet  (John 13:1–17), with Jesus “New Commandment” to love and serve, an idea used by (sometimes antisemitic) Christians to differentiate from the Ten Commandments of Moses. [1]

There are echoes of this in Hamlet 1.2, when Horatio enters, he has the following exchange with Hamlet:

HORATIO

Hail to your Lordship.

HAMLET 

I am glad to see you well.

Horatio—or I do forget myself!

HORATIO

The same, my lord, and your poor servant ever.

HAMLET

Sir, my good friend. I’ll change that name with you.

Horatio calls Hamlet “your lordship” and “lord,” and presents himself to Hamlet as “your servant ever,” to which Hamlet responds that he would change that name (servant) with Horatio [2] [3]. 

This means Hamlet would be servant, and Horatio would be like his "lord" - changing names and roles - like Jesus the master washing the feet of the disciples. 

[To be clear, Hamlet is tempted away from service by revenge, and this distorts his relationships to others for a time...]

Popes have performed the foot washing ritual by washing the feet of cardinals, or more recently, lay people.

After Henry VIII split with Rome, as head of England’s church, he washed the feet of poor men:

"Each year Henry washed the feet of the number of men who equaled his age and gave each of the poor men whose feet he washed a red purse with the number of pence within it that also equaled his age." [4]

When Henry’s daughters Mary I and Elizabeth I became queens, it would have been awkward (scandalous?) for them to wash the feet of men, so they washed the feet of poor women. [5]

A queen washing the feet of women may have offered a metaphor that helped lead to women priests and bishops.

Linda Kay Hoff also notes in this an echo of Revelation 19:10, when “the narrator says of the angel, “Then I fell down at his feet to worship him, but he said to me, “You must not do that! I am a fellow servant with you. . . .” [6]

[Image: Screen capture from YouTube clip of The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003), directed by Peter Jackson, Warner Bros. based on the book by J.R.R. Tolkien. Fair use.]

An echo is found at the end of Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy, when Frodo and the other hobbits bow before King Aragorn and Queen Arwen, and Aragorn tells them they bow to no one.

NOTES: All references to Hamlet (and other Shakespeare plays) are to the Folger Shakespeare Library online versions: https://shakespeare.folger.edu/shakespeares-works/hamlet/entire-play/

[1] The contrast between the “New Commandment” of Jesus, or the “New Law” to love and serve, and the “Old” law of Moses, is in many ways a false contrast promoted by early Christians in order to differentiate themselves from the Jewish faith Jesus believed, preached, and sought to reform as a prophet and teacher, but whose authorities rejected the idea that Jesus had been raised from the dead.

[2] Protestant scholars who authored reference books listing biblical allusions in Shakespeare usually avoided any mention of the Maundy Thursday allusion for Horatio and Hamlet in 1.2. Why was this? Perhaps for three reasons:

A. A key early reference work, by Bishop Charles Wordsworth, was first published just five years after Darwin's "On the Origin of Species" (1859). Most reference works on Shakespeare and the Bible were influenced by empiricism. The allusion in Hamlet 1.2 is a paraphrase, and an empirical approach might reject it for lack of explicit biblical wording. 

B. Protestants are more focused on the Bible as the Word of God, and for this reason, some Protestant scholars may have attended more to explicit chapter-and-verse references, while Catholics are more focused on sacraments.

C. Protestantism in Shakespeare's time said that we are saved, not by works, but by faith alone. The foot-washing ritual and all it symbolizes may be taken to imply that works such as serving others, and loving them as Jesus loved, might offer works as a path to salvation.

Perhaps for these reasons, the servant/lord allusion in 1.1 is overlooked by Charles Wordsworth (1864), Thomas Carter (1905), Richmond Noble (1935), and Naseeb Shaheen (1999).

But it is noted by Peter Milward, a Catholic and a Jesuit, in his 1987 book, Biblical Influences in Shakespeare’s Great Tragedies (11).

[3] On a similar theme, Hamlet insists that Polonius should not merely provide accommodations suited to what he thinks the players deserve, but much better (2.2.555-559), implying a humility and service in hospitality similar to Jesus washing the disciples’ feet.

[4] Link

[5] Link

[6] (Page 138, Hoff, Linda Kay, “Hamlet's Choice: Hamlet—A Reformation Allegory, 1990).
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