Hamlet and the Second Commandment: NO GRAVEN IMAGES (Series)
Puritans in Shakespeare’s time had a reputation for being no fun. As Sir Toby Belch says in Twelfth Night 2.3, "Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?"
The Second Commandment: "THOU SHALT NOT MAKE TO THYSELF ANY GRAVEN IMAGE."
HAMLET AND OPHELIA: In his love letter, Hamlet calls Ophelia “celestial” and addresses her as “my soul’s idol” (2.2.117) [4]. Such rhetoric may have been a convention, but Shakespeare highlights this in a play with other idolatry issues. In a repressed and religiously charged context, Shakespeare may have (in part) been tweaking the preacher’s nose (like Sir Toby to Malvolio).
Sermons warned against idolatry [1] and the wearing of makeup [2], saying as Hamlet does to Ophelia, “God hath given you one face, and you / make yourselves another” (3.1.155-6), equating artifice, painting and “whorish” makeup with graven images, the devil, and idolatry [3].
PAINTINGS:
In 3.4, Hamlet says, “Look here upon this picture and on this, / The counterfeit [5] presentment of two brothers” (63-64). Shakespeare wrote at a time of iconography, when artificial images were condemned in sermons and destroyed, sometimes with royal support [6].
CATHOLIC DEVOTIONS:
Official Elizabethan sermons condemned Catholic devotions as idolatrous, claiming that Catholics took the Eucharist too literally and performed devotions mechanically instead of with deep faith and sincerity [7]. The ghost’s fixation on having died without last sacraments exemplified early Protestant criticism of what they saw as the worst aspects of Catholic devotion.
IDOLIZING DAD: Hamlet idolizes his father with hyperbolic comparisons to gods (3.4.74-77), a “graven image” made of metaphors - in spite of the ghost being purged for “foul crimes” (1.5.15-18), placing his father too high on a pedestal. England’s queen was similarly idolized by courtiers.
In these ways, Shakespeare highlights not only idolatry, but also religious hypocrisy and worrying aspects of Puritanism in his culture [8].
INDEX to this series on Hamlet and the Ten Commandments:
https://pauladrianfried.blogspot.com/2026/07/series-index-ten-commandments-in-hamlet.html
NOTES: All references to Shakespeare plays are to the Folger Shakespeare Library online versions: https://shakespeare.folger.edu
[1] See The Second Book of Homilies, 1563, second chapter or homily, “AN HOMILY AGAINST PERIL OF lDOLATRY AND SUPERFLOUS DECKING OF CHURCHES.” For a stand-alone version of the text, see this link: https://archive.org/details/homilyagainstper00chur/page/n1/mode/2up
[2] See The Second Book of Homilies, 1563, sixth chapter or homily, "An Homily Against Excess of Apparel." For a stand-alone version of the text, see this link: https://archive.org/details/homilyagainstexc00chur/page/n3/mode/2up
[3] See FN 2. Also, Farah Karim-Cooper notes, “A marvelous example of this is in Richard Brathwait’s Time’s Curtaine Drawne (1621) where he compares cosmetics to religious idolatry as he thunders against the use of makeup by women: “Lascivious Idoll, that with painted cheeke, / Sinne-drawing eye, thy sacred vow doest breake / With thy Creator.” Farah Karim-Cooper, Cosmetics in Shakespearean and Renaissance Drama, rev. ed. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019), chap. 1, p.6.
[4] To Catholics, marriage was a sacrament, an experience of the sacred, an echo of Christ the "bridegroom" and his “bride,” the church. But was repressed in Protestant England, where marriage was not considered a sacrament. To Catholics, “my soul’s idol” may have been a coded way to speak of this sacramental aspect of marriage in a culture that (in spite of having a female monarch) was increasingly patriarchal and anti-woman. (John Ruskin: “Shakespeare has no heroes—he has only heroines,” 1865 lecture). This does not by any means prove Shakespeare was secretly a Catholic, but as some scholars have demonstrated, Shakespeare and his contemporaries may likely have had diverse opinions that did not conform to a Catholic-Protestant binary. See Shuger, Debora. “A Protesting Catholic Puritan in Elizabethan England.” Journal of British Studies 48, no. 3 (2009): 587–630. http://www.jstor.org/stable/27752572.
[5] The Elizabethan homily, “An Homily against the Peril of Idolatry” (FN 1) specifically uses the word “counterfeit” in reference especially to religious paintings as graven images and idolatrous.
[6] As in royal injunctions of 1559:
“XXIII. Also, that they shall take away, utterly extinct, and destroy all shrines, coverings of shrines, all tables, candlesticks, trindals, and rolls of wax, pictures, paintings, and all other monuments of feigned miracles, pilgrimages, idolatry, and superstition, so that there remain no memory of the same in walls, glass windows, or elsewhere within their churches and houses; preserving nevertheless, or repairing both the walls and glass windows [58]; and they shall exhort all their parishioners to do the like within their several houses.”
See “The Injunctions of 1559,” Henry Gee and W.H. Hardy, eds., Documents Illustrative of English Church History (New York, 1896), 417-42. Hanover Historical Texts Project. 1998, 2001.
https://history.hanover.edu/texts/engref/er78.html
[7] The English Church had only two primary sacraments, baptism and communion, unlike Catholicism with seven sacraments.
[8] Elsewhere Shakespeare enacts worrying aspects of Puritanism with with Malvolio in Twelfth Night, and Angelo in Measure for Measure.
IMAGES:
TOP: The Adoration of the Golden Calf, circa 1634, by Nicolas Poussin (1594–1665). National Gallery, London. Public domain.
BOTTOM: The Worship of the Golden Calf, c. 1594; Workshop of Jacopo Tintoretto. National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. Public domain.
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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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Thanks for reading!
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My current project is a book tentatively titled Hamlet’s Bible, about biblical allusions and plot echoes in Hamlet.
Below is a link to a list of some of my top posts (“greatest hits”), including a description of my book project (last item on the list):
https://pauladrianfried.blogspot.com/2019/12/top-20-hamlet-bible-posts.html
I usually post every week.
