Religious and Biblical allusions and plot echoes in Hamlet 1.2

Here are a few key religious and biblical allusions in Hamlet 1.2 (not an exhaustive list):
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CLAUDIUS:
...our sometime sister, now our queen,/ [...] Taken to wife.
(1.2.8-14)

For Shakespeare’s English audience, this would have struck a nerve: Henry VIII had married his dead brother’s widow, Katherine of Aragon, but later (after no living sons and an affair with Anne Boleyn) claimed it was a biblically forbidden marriage. 
[For more on the biblical passages related to "incestuous marriage" see this link:
https://pauladrianfried.blogspot.com/2022/06/the-bible-henry-viii-claudius-and.html ]
Therefore he claimed he needed an annulment, which triggered the English Reformation and many executions of Protestants as heretics (by Mary I) and of Catholics as treasonous (by Henry, Edward, Elizabeth). So audiences would have viewed Claudius as being like a Henry VIII who had not repented of his incestuous marriage.


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CLAUDIUS:
Young Fortinbras,
Holding a weak supposal of our worth
Or thinking by our late dear brother’s death
Our state to be disjoint and out of frame,
Colleaguèd with this dream of his advantage,
He hath not failed to pester us with message
Importing the surrender of those lands
Lost by his father…
(1.2.17-24)

Hamlet in a later scene will call Polonius a “Jephthah,” but if you read the whole story of Jephthah in the Bible (Judges, chapters 11–12), you realize that Fortinbras is very much like Jephthah, who first pestered with messages for the return of land claimed by God’s chosen people, and then resorted to violence and prayed for victory, promising God that if his prayer was answered, he would sacrifice the first thing that crossed his threshold upon his victorious return. The first thing to cross his threshold was his daughter....


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CLAUDIUS:
What wouldst thou beg, Laertes,
That shall not be my offer, not thy asking?
The head is not more native to the heart,
The hand more instrumental to the mouth,
Than is the throne of Denmark to thy father.
What wouldst thou have, Laertes?
(1.2.45-51)

Claudius later promises to give ALL his kingdom to Laertes upon L’s return from France, if Laertes can prove Claudius had anything to do with Polonius’ death.
- Because Henry VIII had divorced his first wife over claims of incest, people in England were very familiar with Biblical tales that condemned incestuous marriage. These included Herod Antipas, who married his brother’s wife, whose daughter Salome danced pleasingly for Herod, who was so pleased that he promised Salome anything, up to half of his kingdom, in thanks for the dance. Salome, at her mother’s bidding, asked for the head of John the Baptist, who had condemned the marriage of Herod Antipas to his brother’s wife, as an incestuous marriage.
- This is why Hamlet later names the player queen “Baptista”: Because it points to a biblical tale of an incestuous marriage that was condemned by John the Baptist.
- After learning of his father’s death, instead of asking for the head of Hamlet, Laertes says he would cut his throat of his father’s murderer in the church.
- The favors Claudius will do for Laertes echoes the favor promised to Salome, and Hamlet will also speak to Ophelia of how women amble and jig, a dance reference.
- In this way Shakespeare hints to his Bible-reading, church-attending (by law) audience that Laertes and Ophelia must “dance” (figuratively) in a way that pleases the king, like Salome pleased her step-dad and king, Herod Antipas. 

NOTE: Herod Antipas should not be confused with his father, Herod the Great, famous for the slaughter of the innocent boys in the Nativity story. For the tale of Herod Antipas, Salome, and the beheading of John the Baptist, see  Matthew [14:3-12] and Mark [6:17-29].

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When Claudius asks Polonius if Laertes has obtained his father’s permission to return to France, Polonius replies that he…

POLONIUS: Hath, my lord, wrung from me my slow leave
By laborsome petition, and at last
Upon his will I sealed my hard consent.
(1.2.60-62)

For Shakespeare’s church-attending, Bible-reading audiences, this would have echoed the gospel “Parable of the Unjust Judge” (Luke 18:1–8) in which a widow appeals to a corrupt judge for justice (or in some descriptions, vengeance) against her adversary. The judge ignores her but, because of her persistence, finally grants her request. This sets up Polonius as humorously comparing himself to the corrupt judge.

[Later, in the nunnery scene, scholars will find an echo of the tale of Suzanna and the Corrupt Judges, where two corrupt judges spy on her bathing in her garden, and tell her that if she doesn’t have sex with them both, they will claim they found her meeting with a lover, which would figuratively damn her in the eyes of the community. Here Polonius and Claudius will loosely parallel the two corrupt judges, eavesdropping on Ophelia and Hamlet, with Ophelia as the loose parallel of Suzanna, but she actually meets with her love - who says she is too tempting and must get to a convent/nunnery.]


Why might this parable of the widow and the unjust judge apply? The play involves a widow (Gertrude) and corrupt government officials (Claudius, and to some extent, Polonius), and requires a kind of persistence of the vengeance-tempted prince, like the persistence required of the widow. Hamlet is not sure if God listens to him (like the widow and the judge), but in the end believes Providence is on his side.

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CLAUDIUS:
How is it that the clouds still hang on you?
[...] Why should we in our peevish opposition
Take it to heart? Fie, ’tis a fault to heaven,
A fault against the dead, a fault to nature,
To reason most absurd, whose common theme
Is death of fathers, and who still hath cried,
From the first corse till he that died today,
“This must be so.”
(1.2.68-110)

Stephen Greenblatt of Harvard University (and author of “Hamlet in Purgatory”) claims that Claudius and Gertrude represent a Protestant sensibility, that the dead are dead, and prayers or masses for them will not change their eternal fate (because Protestants generally don’t believe in purgatory), while a Catholic sensibility might do things to shorten a family member’s time in purgatory, such as charity for the poor, or donating to monasteries to have masses said for the deceased loved one.
[On this point, see what Henry says in his prayer before the battle of Agincourt in Shakespeare's Henry V, 4.1.304-316.]
Greenblatt explains that recusant or secret Catholics in Shakespeare’s England did not easily give up their beliefs in purgatory or in prayers for the dead. Such things are later referenced by Laertes at the grave of his sister Ophelia, when he *twice* asks the “churlish priest,” “What ceremony else?“ (5.1.230,232). Many Catholics in the first audiences would have sympathized with Laertes at the loss of many of their familiar rituals. 

~~~~~
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.(1.2.166-169)

Horatio calls Hamlet “lord” and presents himself to the Prince as “your poor servant ever” - and Hamlet responds, calling Horatio “friend” and suggesting he “change that name” with Horatio, that Hamlet should be the servant of his friend. This echoes many gospel passages where Jesus says that the one who wishes to be first must be servant of all:
 
Mark 9:35: And he sat down and called the twelve, and said to them, If any man desire to be first, the same shall be last of all, and servant unto all.”
and in John 13:1–5, where Jesus washes the feet of his disciples, and John 15:15:
“Henceforth call I you not servants: for the servant knoweth not what his master doeth: but I have called you friends: for all things that I have heard of my Father, have I made known to you.”  

Because Henry VIII was head of England’s church, he washed the feet of poor men on Maundy Thursday (or “Holy Thursday” in Holy Week before Easter), after the break with Rome, instead of bishops doing so.
- Mary I washed the feet of poor women on Maundy Thursday.
- Elizabeth I also washed the feet of poor women on Maundy Thursday.

So the enactment of Horatio calling Hamlet his “lord” and presenting himself as “your servant ever” - and Hamlet suggesting those names be changed -  would have been noticed as an echo of Jesus and the disciples at the last supper - and of the rituals of their own English Church and its monarch every year during Holy Week. This may or may not have seemed sincere, with monarchs and servants, or perhaps like Machiavellian PR, using religion as a friendly mask for ruthless politics. As various Shakespeare characters have said, even the devil can quote scripture to suit his purposes.

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What to make of such allusions or plot echoes?

Just because Hamlet resembles Jesus preferring to be the servant to his disciple Horatio, that does not mean Shakespeare thinks Hamlet = Jesus throughout the play: Hamlet will descend into evil and be tempted to madness and revenge, will be a jerk to Ophelia, will kill Polonius by accident and order the beheading of his former friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. We can be sure that Shakespeare did not believe Jesus would do such things.

To put Bible allusions and plot echoes in perspective, I think it’s wrong to believe, with Bishop Charles Wordsworth (1864), that Shakespeare was using his plays to demonstrate and promote Christian truths.

Instead, consider Robert G. Hunter’s perspective, from his book, “Shakespeare and the Mystery of God’s Judgments” (1976):

“Shakespeare is not treating us to an imaginative presentation of theology. He is testing theology with his imagination and using theology for his artistic purpose.” (105)

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Collage Images include samples of work from around the time of Shakespeare’s life, or earlier, except lower right (later):
 
Upper left: Dirck van Baburen
Christ Washing the Apostles Feet
circa 1616 / Staatliche Museen, Berlin
Public Domain via Wikipedia.

Lower left: Paolo Veronese  
Venice, Rome, Padua
Christ Washing the Feet of the Disciples Edit this at Wikidata
1580s / Národní galerie v Praze
Prague, Czech Republic
Public Domain via Wikipedia.

Upper right: Benvenuto Tisi
Ferrara (1512-1550), Rome (1524)
Christ Washing the Disciples' Feet
Between circa 1520 and circa 1525 /
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC
Public Domain via Wikipedia.

Lower right: Ford Madox Brown  
Jesus Washing Peter’s Feet
1852–6 / Tate Britain
Public Domain via Wikipedia.