On the Significance of Hamlet as Boy Jesus in 3.2, Lost and Found in Luke 2

On the Significance of Hamlet as Boy Jesus in 3.2, Lost and Found in Luke 2

Here are some of the possibilities for this allusion’s significance: 

- Hamlet jokes that he is a wonderful son like the boy Jesus, amazing and astonishing elders and parents. 

- A proud, blasphemous, “mad” Hamlet dares to compare himself to Jesus, blind to his own faults (like his blind stabbing of Polonius in the closet scene). 

- Hamlet feels he “must go about [his] father’s business,” and feels “Prompted to [his]  revenge by heaven and hell” (2.2.613).

- There is irony in the fact that the allusion equates Hamlet with the boy Jesus who was conceived by the Holy Ghost, with the Virgin Mary as mother and Joseph as his stepfather; Gertrude (“whored” by Claudius, her second husband) parallels the Virgin Mary, and stepfather Claudius parallels St. Joseph, perhaps an ironic probing of the Protestant questioning the Catholic tradition of the perpetual virginity of Mary.

- Hamlet wants very much to be a source of salvation (like Jesus) for his mother, foreshadowing perhaps the closet scene’s admonishing of Gertrude to repent. (Some may protest that the Jesus of the gospels was more merciful to sinners than Hamlet is to his mother, yet Jesus of the gospels was at times harsh in criticism of the powerful and hard-hearted, but more merciful toward the weak; Gertrude belongs to both groups.

- Hamlet’s joking allusion to Jesus (who differentiated between biological and heavenly father) echoes certain other allusions or references in the play (which I will mention later), foreshadowing Hamlet’s less frequent mention of his biological father after the sea voyage, and his finding the skull of Yorick “of infinite jest,” as if Yorick is a heavenly surrogate father among the communion of fool-saints. (Many have referred to Yorick as a surrogate father of sorts: See Martin W. Walsh, “‘This Same Skull, Sir …’: Layers of Meaning and Tradition in Shakespeare’s Most Famous Prop.” Hamlet Studies 9 (1987): “one need not appeal to modern psychology to find in Yorick a parental surrogate” (74). See also Avi Erlich’ Hamlet's Absent Father (1978 ) which lists Yorick among possible father figures for Hamlet.) 

- Jesus of Nazareth, son of a carpenter, was lost and found in a religious temple, whereas Hamlet was found in secular court theater, and Will Shakespeare of Stratford-Upon-Avon, son of a glove-maker, also found in London, in a secular theater (which may explain some of the allusion’s appeal to the playwright-actor). 

- Scholars who have famously resisted the idea of Hamlet as Christ-figure overlook the fact that the Baptism service of the Book of Common Prayer (BCP 277-281) does not say that the baptized are not sinners (like Hamlet), but that the profession of all the baptized is to be like Christ. BCP 280-1 reminds godparents that the baptized child “maybe virtuously brought up, leading to a godly and a Christian life, remembering alway that baptism doth represent unto us our profession, which is to follow the example of our Savior Christ, and be made like unto him, that as he died and rose for us, so should we which are baptized die from sin, and rise again unto righteousness, continually mortifying all our evil and corrupt affections, and daily proceeding in all virtue and godliness of living.”  

- While it’s easy to see why secular scholars might resist readings of the play that are filtered too much through religious bias, according to Darren Freebury Jones, Shakespeare had a Latin grammar-school education that emphasized imitation; for Elizabethan Christianity to expect imitation of Jesus as portrayed in scripture is not unrelated, and this need not focus on supernatural claims about Jesus. The average Elizabethan Christian was not expected to work miracles, but to embody Christian virtues, even if they were Protestant and believed in salvation by “faith alone,” as this expectation of virtue is written into the baptism ritual.