Religious and Biblical Allusions in Hamlet 1.1
Many viewers and readers of Shakespeare's Hamlet (including me) approach the play from a secular point of view. Yet historians and Shakespeare scholars know that the play was written at a time when there were many religious controversies: Shakespeare's older sister had been baptized Catholic under "Bloody" Mary I, when Protestants had been burned at the stake as heretics. Shakespeare had been baptized under Protestant Elizabeth I, during whose reign many Catholics were executed as traitors, hung until nearly dead and disemboweled so they could see their organs ("drawn and quartered"). Catholics believed in transubstantiation, that the host was actually the body of Christ, but English Protestants took that language less literally. Catholics believed in purgatory, that imperfect but mostly good souls might be purified before entry into heaven, while Protestants believed that at the moment of death, one's fate was sealed, bound for heaven or hell at th...
