Hamlet & Commandment 1: No other gods? (The literal sense) - Series

Why did Hamlet compare his father to Greek and Roman gods - at a time when Elizabeth was often compared to goddesses?

In Shakespeare’s England, churches had the Ten Commandments posted prominently. The first commandment: "THOU SHALT HAVE NO OTHER GODS BUT ME."

Literally: Don’t worship deities of other religions.

Hamlet worries that heaven forbids suicide (“self-slaughter,” 1.2.136), but (oblivious to biblical prohibition of the worship of other gods?) compares his father to a Greek god, the titan Hyperion (1.2.144), and in 3.4, to more gods:

See what a grace was seated on this brow,
Hyperion’s curls, the front of Jove himself,
An eye like Mars’ to threaten and command,
A station like the herald Mercury
New-lighted on a heaven-kissing hill,
A combination and a form indeed
Where every god did seem to set his seal
To give the world assurance of a man.
(3.4.65--72)

The ghost says he’s being purged in an afterlife, as in purgatory of Catholic teaching, not Greek or Roman mythology.

Is Hamlet confused religiously, or is Shakespeare bending Hamlet’s religious allegiances to hold a mirror up to his times?

Elizabethan poets and playwrights [1] including Shakespeare [2] compared Elizabeth I to goddesses (Diana, Venus, Juno, Minerva, Astraea) or their “vestals.” She was called “Virgin Queen” at a time when Catholic Marian devotion was suppressed [3].

Some dismiss this as merely a Renaissance English convention, but many Puritans and Catholics considered the cult of Elizabeth idolatrous [4].

Elizabeth, Supreme Governor of the Church of England, had mandated posting commandment boards in every church, but did nothing to stop hyperbolic praise that compared her to goddesses.

Citizens read and debated biblical texts, and many knew Acts 12:21-23 in which Herod Agrippa, a son of Herod the Great, had been struck by an angel and consumed by worms as punishment for a time when certain of his subjects called him a god, and he had done nothing to correct them.

Hamlet’s hyperbolic praise of his father, King Hamlet, may have involved far more than poetic convention.
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NOTES: All references to Shakespeare plays are to the Folger Shakespeare Library online versions: https://shakespeare.folger.edu

[1] Poet Edmund Spencer's most famous poem, “The Faerie Queene” (1690. 1596), strongly contributed to the cult of Elizabeth that some Puritans found idolatrous.

[2] A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 2.1.163-170:
A certain aim he took
At a fair vestal* thronèd by the west,
And loosed his love-shaft smartly from his bow
As it should pierce a hundred thousand hearts.
But I might see young Cupid’s fiery shaft
Quenched in the chaste beams of the wat’ry moon,
And the imperial vot’ress passèd on
In maiden meditation, fancy-free.

This does not name Elizabeth as a goddess Diana figure, but merely as a “vestal” and “vot’ress.”

*Vestal virgin, devoted to Diana: Note that Cupid’s arrow is “Quenched in the chast beams of the wat’ry moon,” and Elizabeth, the “vestal virgin” and “imperial vot’ress” is unaffected.

[3] Mary, Mother of Jesus, was said by the Catholic church to have been a perpetual virgin, so many have observed that Elizabeth as Virgin Queen filled a void - and perhaps was promoted to fill a void - left by the suppression of the Catholic adoration of the Virgin Mary.

[4] See Helen Hackett, Virgin Mother, Maiden Queen. Elizabeth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (Basingstoke, 1995), pp. 83–7, 207–11;
and Roy Strong, pp 100–1, ‘The popular celebration of the accession day of Queen Elizabeth I’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 21 (1958),abridged in Roy Strong’s book, The Cult of Elizabeth, pp. 117–28.

Also see Montrose, Louis. The Subject of Elizabeth: Authority, Gender, and Representation.
Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2006. Print: “Robert Wright, for instance, was prosecuted for having spoken “against the keeping of the queen’s day, which, he said, was to make her an idol” (qtd. in Montrose 76)” qtd. in Stróbl, Erzsébet, “Virgin Queen and Aging Monarch: Contesting Images of Queen Elizabeth in the Last Decade of Her Reign,” in Focus: Papers in English Literary and Cultural Studies in the Renaissance and Beyond, Ed. Noémi M. Najbauer, University of Pécs, 2014.


IMAGES:
UPPER LEFT: Colored lithograph of Hyperion (one of the Titans, later deposed by Jove and other gods), by Averil Mary Burleigh (1883–1949) from John Keats' poem “Hyperion” (in an edition of “The Poems of John Keats” published by Chapman and Hall, 1911). via Myth and Folklore Wiki (public domain, 100 years or fewer): http://static.wikia.nocookie.net/mythology/images/f/ff/Hyperion-1.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20250208183735

UPPER RIGHT: Jupiter (Jove-Zeus), king of the gods on Mount Olympus, with thunderbolt and sceptre in the clouds. Fresco in Herculaneum, 1–37 AD, public domain via Wikimedia; licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4d/Wall_painting_-_Zeus_and_Eros_-_Herculaneum_%28ins_or_II_basilica-augusteum%29_-_Napoli_MAN_9553.jpg

LOWER RIGHT: Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640) - The Triumph of Victory, circa 1653. Museum Schloss Wilhelmshöhe, Museumslandschaft Hessen Kassel, Kassel, Germany. Public domain via https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/06/Peter_Paul_Rubens_-_The_Triumph_of_Victory_-_WGA20328.jpg

LOWER LEFT: Bartholomeus Spranger (1546–1611), Hermes and Athena (crop), circa 1585. Pražský hrad, Prague. Public domain via https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a4/Spranger%2C_Bartholom%C3%A4us_-_Hermes_and_Athena_-_c._1585.png


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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 explore how the Bible and religion influenced Shakespeare, his plays, and his age.
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