Hamlet and the Reformation - the prince of denmark as Young Man Luther

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Edward T. Oakes, SJ

Hamlet and the Reformation The Prince of Denmark as “Young Man Luther”

William Shakespeare is like St. Paul, at least in this sense: both men have generated a secondary literature so vast that no reader can hope to master it all. Scholars are of course readers first, so they’re in the same bind. But they are also writers. So not only do they have to try to obtain at least a provisional mastery over the prior literature, they must also try to supplement that body of opinion with something new and fresh to say. Graduate students may smite their brows at one more tenure-qualifying monograph on sea-imagery in Shakespeare or on the subjective genitive in Paul’s Letter to the Romans, and they may ask themselves how they are ever going to find an original topic for their dissertations. But duty calls. As the Preacher did not quite say: of the making of dissertations there is no end, and the writing thereof is a weariness to the flesh. Yet secondary literature can still surprise with its fresh insights, even after all these years. To stick to Shakespeare for a moment, the famous Yale critic Harold Bloom speaks of the playwright’s achievement from a perspective that could only come after a long tradition of Shakespeare criticism:

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logos Shakespeare’s most idiosyncratic strength [is that] he is always ahead of you, conceptually and imagistically, whoever and whenever you are. He renders you anachronistic because he contains you; you cannot subsume him.You cannot illuminate him with a new doctrine, be it Marxism or Freudianism or Demanian linguistic skepticism. Instead, he will illuminate the doctrine, not by prefiguration but by postfiguration, as it were: all of Freud that matters most is there in Shakespeare already, with a persuasive critique of Freud besides. The Freudian map of the mind is Shakespeare’s; Freud seems only to have prosified it. Or, to vary my point, a Shakespearean reading of Freud illuminates and overwhelms the text of Freud; a Freudian reading of Shakespeare reduces Shakespeare, or would if we could bear a reduction that crosses the line into absurdities of loss. Coriolanus is a far more powerful reading of Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon than any Marxist reading of Coriolanus could hope to be.1

In this article I propose that Shakespeare wrote Hamlet to illuminate the issues set in motion by the Protestant Reformation and has even managed to adumbrate some key insights into Martin Luther’s dilemma that arose only in the twentieth century. Specifically I argue that he has depicted the Prince of Denmark as “young man Luther” and in doing so has both anticipated and critiqued recent scholarly portraits of Luther. The twentieth century witnessed a revolution in Luther scholarship, which on the Catholic side abjured polemics (very much including accusations of Luther’s “demonic possession”) and on the Protestant side recognized Luther’s thoroughly medieval roots and presuppositions.2 But secular scholars joined the fray too. Under the influence of Freudian categories, they introduced an entirely new approach, most significantly in Erik Erikson’s psycho-biography Young Man Luther.3 Almost upon its publication, the book came under fire for its heavy-handed use of Freudian categories and its procrustean speculations about Luther’s childhood unmoored by

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evidence. Nor were these accusations made parti pris by only Lutheran historians and theologians but very much by historians with no confessional biases such as this comment from the pen of an Anglican historian: Erikson believes that the adolescent Luther creates a God in the image of his own irascible father, shifts his obedience to this terrible Deity and releases the venom of his defiance against the Pope. Again, Luther is caned for speaking German in school-hours, so he becomes fanatically attached to the German language. Likewise his resentment against the severity of his mother causes him to dethrone the Virgin Mary. . . . When interpreted in the light of contemporary manners, [however,] Luther’s childhood and adolescence seem strikingly “normal” and unsensational. By the standards expected in that period, his parents were far from heavy-handed; they were deeply devoted to his welfare and he remained on unusually affectionate terms with them to the end of their long lives. . . . So far as concerns his alleged complex over the German language, in fact he became just as voluble and prolific in Latin as in German; his Bible-reading and private devotions were carried out in the former. While in his revolt he sought to abolish saint-worship, he did not in actual fact single out the Blessed Virgin, but continued to regard her with heartfelt reverence quite unusual among Protestants.4

Ironically, the Lutheran theologian George Lindbeck is more favorable to Erikson’s thesis than was the Anglican Dickens: “Despite questionable historical details and reservations regarding Erikson’s own ideological framework, I found myself feeling in my bones that on one basic level he is fundamentally right about Luther, and that even when he isn’t right, he is suggestive.”5 That said, Lindbeck scores Erikson for the same historical errors and empty speculation that other historians found in the book: “There is, to be sure, precious little historical data to appeal to, but on balance it is more

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logos unfavorable than favorable to Erikson’s speculations about Martin’s parents.”6 But no sooner has Lindbeck joined the chorus of historians attacking these empty speculations than he admits the fundamental relevance of Luther’s biography to his theology: “All that Erikson needs in order to make his portrait of the young man plausible is the undisputed fact that there was a disagreement with the father over [Martin’s] entrance into the monastery, and that this was connected with intra-psychic problems, with guilt and rebelliousness. It makes no difference whether these problems are viewed as basically causes or effects of the decision to become a monk.”7 In other words, the connection between Luther’s personality and his theology is close enough that a concentration on his personality to explain the theology cannot be ruled out of court automatically on the grounds of Freudian reductionism, however dubious Erikson’s efforts might have been in practice. This connection between personality and theology in Luther becomes especially evident when one focuses first and above all on the theology. From that perspective one discovers that the Wittenberger’s theology can only be illuminated (and even explained) by looking at his personality, as the Lutheran bishop from Sweden Krister Stendahl did in his extremely influential article “The Apostle Paul and the Introspective Consciousness of the West,” a lecture he delivered, tellingly enough, at the annual meeting of the American Psychological Association in 1961.8 Although the impact of this article was ultimately to revolutionize Pauline studies, resulting in a completely new understanding of the function of justification in Paul’s letters, it did so by first accusing Luther (and, by extension, Augustine) of misunderstanding Paul, as if he were addressing the problem of the plagued conscience (a quintessential psychological and biographical issue), which had in fact never been Paul’s own personal problem: A fresh look at the Pauline writings themselves shows that Paul was equipped with what in our eyes must be called a rather “robust” conscience. In Phil. 3 Paul speaks most fully

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about his life before his Christian calling, and there is no indication that he had any difficulty in fulfilling the Law. On the contrary, he can say that he had been “flawless” as to the righteousness required by the Law (v. 6). His encounter with Jesus Christ—at Damascus, according to Acts 9:1–9—has not changed this fact. It was not to him a restoration of a plagued conscience; when he says that he now forgets what is behind him (Phil. 3:1–13), he does not think about the shortcomings in his obedience to the Law, but about his glorious achievements as a righteous Jew, achievements which he nevertheless now has learned to consider as “refuse” in the light of his faith in Jesus as the Messiah.9

The case for Luther was quite otherwise, whose conscience in the monastery at Erfurt was entirely plagued by guilt and a sense of inadequacy in fulfilling the “law” of religious life: “In him we find the problem of late medieval piety and theology. . . . In these matters Luther was a truly Augustinian monk, since Augustine may well have been one of the first to express the dilemma of the introspective conscience.”10 It was this Luther who becomes, I suggest, the focus of Shakespeare’s play and the determinant for his portrait of the prince of Denmark, the man of plagued conscience who spoke to Ophelia in these terms: “I am myself indifferent honest; but yet I could accuse me of such things that it were better my mother had not borne me. I am very proud, revengeful, ambitious; with more offences at my beck than I have thoughts to put them in, imagination to give them shape, or time to act them in. What should such fellows as I do crawling between heaven and earth? We are arrant knaves, all; believe none of us” (3.1.121–30).11 The central problem of the play, as was recognized almost upon its first appearance on stage, centers on why Hamlet hesitates in following out his father’s ghostly demand to avenge his death, quite in violation of the conventions of all other revenge tragedies. Interpretations explaining this indecision have ranged all over the map, but

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logos only recently have critics come to recognize that Hamlet’s hesitation is first and primarily a theological hesitation. Strangely, this insight has been late in coming, even though Shakespeare peppered his play with hints and indications that he meant Hamlet to be a commentary on the Reformation; not least of course is his making the prince study in Wittenberg, of all places, when he hears of his father’s death and his mother’s hasty marriage. That geographical hint, however, was largely ignored until late in the twentieth century. Most previous interpretations of the play sought the explanation for Hamlet’s hesitation in the exigencies of his conflicted personality. The most famous advocate of this focus is, of course, Sigmund Freud; later, it was adopted by his biographer Ernst Jones, who picked up on a footnote in Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams (1900) and then developed it into a full-bore thesis in his book Hamlet and Oedipus (1949). Under this Oedipal reading, Hamlet hesitates to kill his uncle Claudius because he is secretly relieved that Claudius had done what Hamlet wished he could have done: namely kill his father and marry his mother, just as Oedipus did. In its favor, this interpretation does help to explain the universal appeal of the play, which, when examined more closely, seems a strange candidate for not only Shakespeare’s most famous play but also the most famous play in world literature, with the possible exception of Sophocles’s Oedipus the King.12 Even before Freud came on the scene, A. C. Bradley had focused on the personality of the prince and blamed Hamlet’s self-confessed “melancholy” (“I have of late, but wherefore I know not, lost all my mirth”) for his hesitation, a melancholy brought on by his father’s death and his mother’s “o’er-hasty marriage.” Related to that view are the earlier Romantic ones advocated by Wolfgang von Goethe, who argued in Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1796) that Hamlet was too good for this world, too sensitive, too poetic to carry out the barbarous duty of murder; and by Samuel Coleridge, who claimed that Hamlet the student was too prone to look on all sides of an issue before acting, making the play, in effect, a “tragedy of thought.”

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Recent criticism has come to reject these personality-driven approaches, whether Romantic or Freudian, and instead chooses to look at the historical setting of the play in order to see Hamlet’s conflict as essentially theological. To be sure, Eliot had already signaled a dissatisfaction with all Romantic interpretations of the play,13 but even he failed to notice what Paul Cantor sees as the most obvious setting for the tragedy: “It is remarkable how many of the complications of Hamlet’s situation can be traced to the impact of his belief in an afterlife has on his thinking.”14 Cantor applies this insight against the broader background of the revenge theme in literature, using Western letters’ first and premier example of the man of revenge, Achilles in Homer’s Iliad, for his contrast: One might formulate what distinguishes Hamlet from a classical hero in many ways, but one can begin from this basic point: his cosmos is not that of Achilles. The Greek hero lives in a universe with finite horizons: he knows that he is mortal and that death offers at most an existence as a bloodless shade, an existence to which life on earth even as a slave is preferable (as Achilles’s reveals in the Odyssey). His singleminded determination as a warrior is related to his sense of his mortality. Because he knows that his fate is to die young, he realizes that he has only a brief period of time to win glory for himself. Indeed, the only meaningful form of immortality his world offers him is the survival of his name through fame.15

The setting for Hamlet could not be more different, a point insufficiently stressed by critics until the late twentieth century. At all events, what Cantor sees cannot be denied by any critic once it has been pointed out: Hamlet, by contrast, living in the modern Christian world, believes that his soul is immortal (I.iv.65–8). This may seem like an obvious point, but it has wide-ranging implications

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logos for our understanding of Shakespeare’s play. . . . From the very beginning [Hamlet] is preoccupied with the afterlife because from the very beginning he is preoccupied with suicide. Suicide is the issue on which Shakespeare demonstrates most clearly his awareness of the distinction between ancient, pagan heroes and modern, Christian ones.16

The centrality of the issue of suicide in the play actually, if paradoxically, moves the center of debate over Hamlet’s indecision from his personality to his operative eschatology. Cantor demonstrates this by looking at the alacrity with which Brutus seeks his own death at the end of Julius Caesar despite his own clear affinities with Hamlet’s personality: From our perspective, suicide is a surprisingly unproblematic notion for Shakespeare’s Romans. Their ethic demands suicide from them when dishonor and disgrace are the alternative. Because they view it as a noble deed, they do not hesitate to commit suicide when the time comes. This is true even in the case of Brutus, a character often compared to Hamlet as a thoughtful, meditative man, who has difficulty making up his mind. But Brutus approaches his suicide with a firm resolve. Whatever his temperamental affinities with Hamlet may be, he has a diametrically opposed attitude towards suicide. This difference is not to be explained in terms of what we would today call contrasting “personalities,” but rather in terms of the contrasting regimes under which Brutus and Hamlet live. Brutus’ regime practically mandates suicide for a noble man under certain circumstances, whereas Hamlet’s forbids it under any circumstances.17

But of course the key to Hamlet’s mind here is the fact that he does not use the Christian “canon ’gainst self-slaughter” as a univocal prohibition that must be obeyed without further ado, that is, without further reflection. The key, rather, is Hamlet’s uncertainty about the truth of the Christian account of the afterlife. And that

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uncertainty motivates, indeed constitutes, his indecision, a point Cantor rightly sees but never quite explains: “Hamlet’s belief in the immortality of the soul vastly raises the stakes involved in heroic action but, given the uncertainties surrounding life after death, it simultaneously makes it more difficult to calculate the consequences of such action.”18 But why is Hamlet so uncertain? Cantor’s interpretation consistently places the play in the context of the Renaissance, that unique blend of classical Greek and Roman cultural norms within the setting of the Catholic religion. But, with rare exceptions, Renaissance artists displayed no hesitation about the truth of the Catholic account of the afterlife, as Dante’s Divine Comedy and Michelangelo’s frescos in the Sistine Chapel irrefutably show. Nothing in Shakespeare’s play gives any indication that Hamlet is a skeptic in the Hobbesian or Humean mode but rather is a Christian of a peculiar type: one torn between two rival versions of Christian eschatology, Catholic and Lutheran. That point should have been obvious all along, given the fact that Hamlet had been a student in Luther’s Wittenberg, on whose cathedral doors the future reformer had posted his Ninety-Five Theses. Yet, in one of the strangest episodes in the history of literary criticism, that point was largely forgotten until the publication of Stephen Greenblatt’s highly regarded monograph, Hamlet in Purgatory.19 Although the book’s title is somewhat of a misnomer, inasmuch as the play Hamlet is not treated until the last chapter (out of five), it establishes beyond any possibility of doubt or cavil that the question of the afterlife was the key to all the other disputes animating the polemics between the Catholic Church and the Reformation of the sixteenth century, very much including questions of justification, works, sola scriptura, or papal/conciliar authority. Greenblatt establishes his thesis using basically two arguments, one theoretical and the other historical. Theoretically, if the Reformers could be successful in demonstrating that purgatory did not exist, then the whole edifice of indulgences collapses, and with

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logos it the whole “economy” (in both senses of that word) of salvation upon which the theology of indulgences depends: works, merit, development of doctrines not directly present in Scripture, intercession of the saints, prayers for the dead—all of these features of medieval Catholicism depend directly on the assumption of the existence of purgatory.20 For that reason, as Greenblatt’s historical survey shows, Reformed polemics aimed the largest part of their fire against the doctrine of purgatory understandably enough given its place as the linchpin of all the features of the medieval Church that the Reformers considered corrupt.21 Given this fierce antipurgatorial polemic, which Hamlet would have absorbed while studying in Wittenberg, no wonder he was so deeply shocked at encountering his father’s ghost, who tells him (italics mine): I am thy father’s spirit, Doomed for a certain term to walk the night, And for the day confined to fast in fires, Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature Are burnt and purged away.  (1.9–13)

Purgatory exists! But does it? Although he promises the ghost directly that he will obey the injunction to avenge his father’s “foul and most unnatural murder,” Hamlet immediately intimates to Horatio and the guards that he plans to put an antic disposition on. Why? We soon learn: I know my course. The spirit that I have seen May be a devil, and the devil hath power T’assume a pleasing shape, yea, and perhaps, Out of my weakness and my melancholy, As he is very potent with such spirits, Abuses me to damn me. I’ll have grounds More relative than this. The play’s the thing Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king. (2.2.585–92)

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So if Hamlet can independently confirm the ghost’s accusations, he will not only know the truth of the matter but also know that the spirit has not come from hell—rather from purgatory. Thus the roots of his indecision are fundamentally theological: taught at university that purgatory does not exist but told by the ghost that it does, he has no choice but to seek independent confirmation of the ghost’s tale, being himself torn in conviction between his Catholic upbringing and his Lutheran education.22 There are, to be sure, elements in the play that mitigate against Greenblatt’s thesis; above all, the strange fact that the playlet that Hamlet puts on for the royal court in Elsinore is not really designed, despite superficial appearances to the contrary, to trap the king into exposing his guilt.To the best of my knowledge, Craig Bernthal is the first critic to point out that Hamlet has skewed the plot of his confection, The Murder of Gonzago,23 to guarantee Claudius’s reaction, no matter what the truth of his involvement in King Hamlet’s death: Claudius murdered his brother to get his kingdom and his queen. In Hamlet’s play it is a nephew, Lucianus, who murders his uncle, Gonzago. Claudius, even if he were innocent, would have every right, given Hamlet’s erratic behavior, to take this as a barely veiled threat. Since Claudius’s reaction to “The Mousetrap” could verify either of two hypotheses, it ultimately fails to reveal the truth. . . . Has Hamlet’s desire to find Claudius guilty made him construct a trap that is ­biased?24

Bernthal also points out, with numerous other critics in the past, the moral dilemma into which this supposedly purgatorial ghost places his son: is not vengeance a mortal sin? What soul would be given a temporary reprieve from purgatory (by God presumably) for a sojourn to the earthly realm solely in order to command the sin of murder by a mortal who has yet himself to face the judgment seat of God? How could Hamlet conceive of the ghost as anything other than the devil? Here’s the dilemma:

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logos The irony deepens as the ghost, already in purgatory, convinces Hamlet to commit the sin of taking revenge: “If ever thou didst thy dear father love . . . revenge his foul and most unnatural murder” (I v 23, 25). How much more hellish will King Hamlet’s time in purgatory be for encouraging a sin of the most serious kind? And what kind of father would want to put his son’s soul in danger by persuading him to commit such a sin?25

This last point has been a staple of Hamlet criticism from as early as the seventeenth century, but I wonder if it doesn’t miss a crucial factor. Besides its rather flat-footed moralism, the objection overlooks the role of a medieval king as himself the font and embodiment of the law. Consider this alternative scenario: what if Hamlet had stumbled upon the love letters of Gertrude and Claudius, where he could read of their plot to kill the old king and marry soon after? This news, now needing no independent corroboration, would have told Hamlet that Claudius was in fact no king at all, but rather young Hamlet was. That fact alone would justify Hamlet in seeking to overthrow the putative “king,” since he would not only be avenging high treason but would be assuming his rightful and lawful place on the throne of Denmark.26 The play already tells us that young Hamlet is more popular with the Danes than Claudius, which prevents the usurping king from acting against his nephew: The other motive Why to a public count I might not go Is the great love the general gender bear him, Who, dipping all his faults in their affection, Work like the spring that turneth wood to stone, Convert his gyres to graces; so that my arrows, Too slightly timbered for so loud a wind, Would have reverted to my bow again, But not where I had aimed them. (4.7.16–24)

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Claudius’s only recourse is not to let Hamlet out of his sight. Thus his refusal to let his charge return to university: “For your intent in going back to school in Wittenberg, it is most retrograde to our desire” (1.2.112–14). Thus too his charge to Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern “to draw him on to pleasures and to gather . . . whether aught to us unknown afflicts him thus that, opened, lies within our remedy” (2.2.15–18).27 So, under the assumption that Hamlet would be fully justified in overthrowing the usurper if he could be sure that Claudius had usurped the throne, his focus has to be to arrange a test of the ghost’s authenticity, which itself involves a theological interrogation into which eschatology is correct, Catholic or Protestant. No one disputes that in the process of probing the ghost’s reality and veracity, Hamlet destroys the court, hands Denmark over to Norway, leaves the stage littered with corpses, and above all, destroys his very soul. One can even say Hamlet’s progressive degradation of soul from the moment of his encounter with the ghost is what the play is about. True, he is already ripe for destruction before he meets the specter, as he tells us in the second scene of the play: O that this too, too solid flesh would melt, Thaw and resolve itself into a dew, Or that the Everlasting had not fixed His canon ’gainst self-slaughter. O God! God! How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable Seem to me all the uses of this world! Fie on’t, ah fie, ’tis an unweeded garden That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature Possess it merely. (1.2.129–37)

Soon after comes the encounter with the ghost, the shock of which leads to one of the most remarkable dissolutions of a human soul ever portrayed on the stage. Earlier, Hamlet had claimed he abjured all displays of seeming and dissimulation:

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logos Seems, madam? Nay, it is. I know not “seems.” ’Tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother, Nor customary suits of solemn black Nor windy suspiration of forced breath, No, nor the fruitful river in the eye, Nor the dejected havior of the visage, Together with all forms, moods, shapes of grief, That can denote me truly. These indeed seem, For they are actions that a man might play; But I have that within which passes show, These but the trappings and the suits of woe. (1.2.64–86)

But no sooner has he promised the ghost to sweep to his revenge “with wings as swift as meditation or the thoughts of love” (1.5.29– 30), no sooner has he expressed his revulsion at the news of Claudius’s perfidy underneath his royal mien (“Meet it is I set it down that one may smile, and smile, and be a villain” [1.5.108]), than he begins his dissimulations: first he demands of Horatio, Bernardo, and Marcellus that they speak nothing of what they have seen; then he announces his plans to them to feign madness: Here, as before, never, so help you mercy, How strange or odd soe’er I bear myself— (As I perchance hereafter shall think meet To put an antic disposition on),     . . . . That you know aught of me—this . . . do . . . Swear. (1.5.177–80, 187)

With simulated madness as his cover, Hamlet then begins an unparalleled declension of character: he spurns Ophelia in the harshest of terms; he kills her father Polonius without remorse (“I’ll lug the guts into the neighbor room. . . . This counselor is now most still, most secret, and most grave, who was in life a foolish prating knave” [3.4.214–17]), which sends Ophelia into madness herself, a madness that leads to her death; he arranges for the death of Rosenkrantz and

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Guildenstern without remorse (“They are not near my conscience” [5.2.58]); and finally he ends his last day on earth not just having killed Claudius but causing the deaths of his mother and Laertes too. Not even the rites of death escape his ruinous intervention: at Ophelia’s funeral, itself already a locus of intra-Catholic religious dispute (“Her obsequies have been as far enlarged as we have warranty,” says the officiating priest; “Her death was doubtful” [5.1.210– 11]), he desecrates these rites by fighting with Laertes literally in her grave: “The dispute over Ophelia’s funeral ceremony is an instance of an overarching phenomenon in Hamlet: the disruption or poisoning of virtually all rituals for managing grief, allying personal and collective anxiety, and restoring order.”28 But by far the most vivid sign of Hamlet’s loss of his own soul comes when he spots Claudius at prayer and refuses to kill him then, lest he, nolens volens, sends the king’s soul to heaven! No, it is not enough for him to obey his uncle’s charge to overthrow Claudius. He must add a codicil to the ghost’s injunction by sending his uncle to hell: A villain kills my father, and for that I, his sole son, do this same villain send—to heaven. Why, this is hire and salary, not revenge. He took my father grossly, full of bread, With all his crimes broad blown, as flush as May; And how his audit stands who knows save heaven? But in our circumstance and course of thought ’Tis heavy with him. And am I then revenged, To take him in the purging of his soul, When he is fit and seasoned for his passage? —No. Up, sword, and know thou a more horrid hent [opportunity]: When he is drunk asleep, or in his rage, Or in th’incestuous pleasure of his bed, At game a-swearing, or about some act That has no relish of salvation in’t, Then trip him, that his heels may kick at heaven

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logos And that his soul may be as damned and black As hell, whereto it goes.  (3.3.76–95)

One of the more remarkable achievements of this play is the way Shakespeare somehow is able to draw playgoers into the tormented mind of Hamlet so that we actually sympathize, even identify, with him, despite his otherwise appalling behavior. The playwright had always known how to portray genuine villainy; and he could also make some of his heroes thoroughly unsympathetic, even repellent (Coriolanus, Timon of Athens); and he even wrote a rather unfunny “comedy,” Measure for Measure, in which everyone is unpleasant. To some extent, the hero/villain Macbeth is treated sympathetically, although most viewers surely feel that the Scottish king got his comeuppance at the end. But only Hamlet comes across as thoroughly corrupt in soul, a man callous in his regard for others and destructive in everything he touches—yet whom the audience comes, if not exactly to admire, at least to forgive, as a man whose circumstances, both external and personal, led him to his ineluctable tragedy. Perhaps Bloom has captured best this peculiar alchemy whereby Hamlet’s obviously catastrophic personality gets transformed into something strangely sympathetic: He is a hero who pragmatically can be regarded as a villain: cold, murderous, solipsistic, nihilistic, manipulative. We can recognize Iago by those modifiers, but not Hamlet, since pragmatic tests do not accommodate him. Consciousness is his salient characteristic; he is the most aware and knowing figure ever conceived. We have the illusion that nothing is lost upon this fictive personage. Hamlet is a Henry James who is also a swordsman, a philosopher in line to become a king, a prophet of a sensibility still out ahead of us, in an era to come.29

Such an achievement (no doubt due largely to the psychological brilliance of the soliloquies) raises to a whole new level of complexity the question of Shakespeare’s attitude toward the Reformation.

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If Hamlet is an Elizabethan version of “young man Luther,” what is Shakespeare saying about this recent division of Christianity, one that brought so much death, imprisonment, and civil strife to his own country and near relations, caused by a figure who, from one perspective, destroyed Europe as Hamlet had ruined Denmark? Mention of Shakespeare’s extended family, who were mostly Catholic, raises the specter, so to speak, of his own religious affiliation and convictions. I do not deny that, if it could be firmly and univocally established that Shakespeare was himself a committed and orthodox Catholic, such a “fact” would have direct bearing on the interpretation of Hamlet; but I find the evidence too ambiguous to rely on, which blocks that hermeneutical avenue. Personally, I subscribe to the thesis of Robert Miola, who comes to this judgment: The evidence for Shakespeare’s biographical Catholicity presents nothing like proof but only intriguing possibility. Even if we could determine that his family and friends were clearly and consistently Catholic, we could not then reasonably conclude anything definite about Shakespeare’s religious belief and practice. Catholics have always believed in baptism by blood and baptism by desire but never, so far as I know, in baptism by association. . . . Still, even if the case for Shakespeare’s biographical Catholicity finally remains uncertain, Shakespeare studies are better for having entertained it. The case for his Protestantism is equally uncertain, and this change in the critical default opens up new possibilities.30

That said, the web of connections of Shakespeare’s family with Catholic attachments must surely be relevant to his own awareness of the impact of the Reformation on the old religion. The development of thought in the following first appeared in an article I published in First Things and is offered here as background.31 Shakespeare’s mother, Mary Arden, came from one of the most prominent and tenacious Catholic families in Warwickshire. The head of the clan, Edward Arden, for instance, kept

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logos his own Catholic priest, disguised as a gardener but known throughout the Avon valley as Father Hugh Hall. One of Arden’s sons-in-law, a hot-headed Catholic fanatic named John Somerville, travelled to London on a personal mission to assassinate the Queen; apparently quite deranged, he betrayed his intentions to anyone who would listen to his rantings during his frequent tavern-hopping. Inevitably, he was arrested and, under torture, implicated Arden and Hall. The priest died in prison while his case was being adjudicated; but the hapless Arden was hanged, drawn and quartered, and his head stuck on a spike on London Bridge. William Shakespeare was nineteen years old at the time of his cousin’s execution (1583). Well before that traumatic date, from as far back as William’s thirteenth year, his father John had begun to run into financial difficulties, at which time he tried to avoid town meetings and church attendance, allegedly to elude summons by subpoena. No doubt the debts were real (he defaulted on a mortgage in 1580), but the father’s financial woes seem to have been exacerbated by Crown revenge against the Ardens. In any event, John’s name was entered on the recusant rolls of Stratford in 1592 for failing to come to Anglican church services on Sunday, as the law required. One often reads that John Shakespeare’s absence was due strictly to his fear of subpoena (one could be served for debt in church). But his Catholic convictions must have played at least some role in the father’s recusancy, for on April 27, 1757, a bricklayer working on the son’s birthplace in Stratford came across a six-page manuscript, hidden under the roof tiles, of John Shakespeare’s last will and spiritual testament. To the rather queasy surprise of eighteenth-century England, the document unhesitatingly affirmed John’s Catholic faith (for example, the formula referred to the “glorious and ever Virgin Mary, refuge and advocate of sinners” and asked for intercessory “prayers and Masses” to speed the testator through purgatory, etc.). The authenticity of the document was challenged for a while, but then an English Jesuit, Herbert Thurston, discov-

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ered in 1911 that John Shakespeare had used the testament, almost word for word, from a translation by Jesuits Robert Parsons and Edmund Campion of a testament first composed by Carlo Cardinal Borromeo for Catholics in his diocese during the plague years in Milan in the late 1570s. Before leaving for England, Parsons and Campion had visited Borromeo and were given copies of the testament to bring with them; and we know that Campion got to within twelve miles of Stratford before his arrest in June 1581. Somerville’s plot was exposed in the fall of 1583, so it must have been around then that John Shakespeare hid—but tellingly did not destroy— his treasonous profession of faith. (There is also a possibility that John’s financial difficulties were caused by his recusancy, for many Catholic gentlemen of that age often avoided fines by “conveying” their property to friends and relatives.) None of this can prove anything about William Shakespeare’s own private convictions [as Miola rightly points out]; but we do know that his daughter was fined for recusancy and that William and his fiancée Anne Hathaway married not in his Stratford church but in Temple Grafton, five miles from his birthplace. Neither the Shakespeares nor the Hathaways had connections there; but the vicar of the village, John Frith, was cited in contemporary records as “unsound in religion,” a code term for Catholic priests. And finally, a seventeenth-century Anglican Archdeacon from nearby Coventry reported that, according to Stratford oral tradition, Shakespeare “died a papist.”

I must stress here once again that I am offering this information for background purposes only. The question of Shakespeare’s religion is still far too controverted to make his biography useful in the interpretation of his plays and lyric poetry. Moreover, as John Keats pointed out long ago, Shakespeare’s “negative capability”— his ability to submerge his own personality into his characters so that they speak on their own terms rather than being mouthpieces for some ideological hobbyhorse of Shakespeare’s own—means that we must always work inside the framework and characters of

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logos the plays themselves. But this background surely at least shows this: that Shakespeare lived in a highly charged religious setting and was acutely aware of the implications of the dangers entailed in religious affiliation and theology.32 When it suited his purposes Shakespeare could even indulge, so to speak, in witty riffs on the Catholic doctrine of purgatory and indulgences, as when he has Prospero compare the audience’s applause with their “indulgence” of his performance: Now my charms are all o’erthrown, And what strength I have’s mine own, Which is most faint:    . . . . Now I want Spirits to enforce, art to enchant, And my ending is despair, Unless I be relieved by prayer, Which pierces so that it assaults Mercy itself and frees all faults. As you from crimes would pardoned be, Let your indulgence set me free. (The Tempest, Epilogue)

In other words, for purposes of interpretation all that is required is the knowledge that Hamlet was produced around 1601 and was written by a man saturated in the religious conflicts of his time who had himself a solid command, at least for theatrical purposes, of the subtleties of Catholic and Reformation eschatology. So, given all of the above, what does the play have to say about the Reformation? Obviously and first of all, Hamlet is a tragedy and thus, for Shakespeare, so too was the Reformation. At first blush, such a thesis sounds trite and unilluminating, until we look at the “root causes,” as the expression goes, of that tragedy. As everyone recognizes, Hamlet’s tragedy begins to unfold at the moment of his first indecision, which is itself caused, as we saw, by his uncertainty of the afterlife and its nature. Almost a century after the play was put on

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stage, Thomas Hobbes would say that when a man says he has met God in a dream, the outside skeptic could equally well reply that the man had a dream of God. In other words, there is no verification of the afterlife this side of death.33 This surely is the central dilemma of the play, made gloriously manifest in its most famous soliloquy, the famous “To be or not to be” speech: Who would fardels bear, To grunt and sweat under a weary life, But that the dread of something after death, The undiscovered country, from whose bourn No traveler returns, puzzles the will, And makes us rather bear those ills we have Than fly to others that we know not of? Thus conscience does make cowards of us all.  (3.1.76–83)

This uncertainty is not only the center of the play, the very motor that explains all of Hamlet’s tormented ambivalence, it was also the reason that religious strife in Elizabethan England remained so chronic and unresolved, even to our present times.34 “Hamlet is a play of contagious, almost universal self-estrangement,” says Greenblatt, a theme Shakespeare signals in the opening scene of the play: “Say what, is Horatio there?” asks Bernardo on the castle walls at midnight, to which Horatio responds, “A piece of him” (1.1.21– 22). This was Europe in 1600: in pieces, with all hopes of union and unity forever gone, lost in the interminable and irresolvable debates over purgatory, merit, indulgences, finding favor with God, Church authority versus the authority of the Bible. “Protestants sometimes wrote as if the whole doctrine of Purgatory were a stage set, a will-o’the-wisp, a filthy spiderweb they could simply sweep away,” Greenblatt writes.35 But within a few years, the Puritans among them tried to abolish the stage as well, just as they had already dispatched the doctrine of purgatory as a poet’s fable. Terminology of the stage often referred to the ceiling or canopy as “heaven” and the understage as “hell.” The stage was earth; but as we

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logos saw with Prospero’s epilogue, also a kind of purgatory. “Does this mean that Shakespeare was participating in a secularization process, one in which the theater offers a disenchanted version of what the cult of Purgatory once offered?” Greenblatt asks. “Perhaps. But the palpable effect is something like the reverse: Hamlet immeasurably intensifies a sense of the weirdness of the theater, its proximity to certain experiences that had been organized and exploited by religious institutions and rituals.”36 Here perhaps can be located the ultimate import of Shakespeare’s view of the Reformation: the uncertainties it introduced over purgatory are but a reflection of a more general dread of something after death. Hamlet puzzles the will because the afterlife does.

Notes 1. Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages (New York: Riverhead Books, 1994), 24; original emphasis. 2. See above all, for the Catholic side, John Patrick Dolan, History of the Reformation: A Conciliatory Assessment of Opposite Views (New York: Desclee, 1965); and on the Protestant, Heiko Augustinus Oberman, The Dawn of the Reformation: Essays in Late Medieval and Early Reformation Thought (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1986) and Luther: Man Between God and the Devil, trans. Eileen Walliser-Scharzbart (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989). As the title implies, this latter book is firmly insistent that Luther can only be understood as a man of his times: This book has been written with the double assumption that, first, the Reformer can only be understood as a late medieval man for whom Satan is as real as God and mammon; and, second, that the relevancy so sought after is not found by purging the record and hence submitting to post-Enlightenment standards of modernity, but rather by challenging our condescending sense of having outgrown the dark myths of the past. . . . Getting to know Martin Luther requires more than just following him to the various scenes of the Reformation and more than just compiling theological highlights, though all this is part of our pursuit. The crucial point is to grasp the man in his totality—with head and heart, in and out of tune with the temper of his times. (xvii, xix; emphases in the original) 3. Erik H. Erikson, Young Man Luther: A Study in Psychoanalysis and History (NewYork:W. W. Norton & Company, 1958). 4. A. G. Dickens, Martin Luther and the Reformation (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), 13.

hamlet and the reformation 5. George A. Lindbeck, “Erikson’s Young Man Luther: A Historical and Theological Reappraisal,” in Encounter with Erikson: Historical Interpretation and Religious Biography, ed. Donald Capps,Walter H. Capps, and M. Gerald Bradford (Missoula, MT: Scholars Press, 1977), 8. 6. Ibid., 12. And of course, if Erikson cannot gain access to the family dynamics of Luther’s upbringing, his psychoanalysis of “young boy Luther” collapses, and with it, his speculations on young man Luther, and this on the grounds of his own chosen methodology. 7. Ibid., 14. 8. Krister Stendahl, “The Apostle Paul and the Introspective Consciousness of the West,” first published in Harvard Theological Review 56 (1963): 199–215; and reprinted in The Writings of St. Paul, ed. Wayne A. Meeks, Norton Critical Edition (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1972), 422–34. All citations from this article will be drawn from the Meeks volume. 9. Ibid., 423. 10. Ibid., 425. Further: “It was not until Augustine that the Pauline thought about the Law and Justification was applied in a consistent and grand style to a more general and times human problem. . . . This Augustinian line leads into the Middles Ages and reaches its climax in the penitential struggle of an Augustinian monk, Martin Luther, and in his interpretation of Paul” (426). 11. William Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. Roma Gill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992; 2nd rev. ed. 2002). 12. In other words, the centrality of the Oedipal theme in these two plays coupled with the near-universal recognition of their respective centrality in the Sophoclean and Shakespearean canon must speak to something crucially Oedipal in human nature, claim the Freudians, overriding whatever dramatic flaws they might have as plays. Admittedly, that is not easy to argue for Sophocles’ Oedipus, which Aristotle claimed was the best play in the Greek canon (and he had access to far more tragedies than we do). But at least as regards Hamlet, they have in their favor T. S. Eliot’s claim that “far from being Shakespeare’s masterpiece, the play is most certainly an artistic failure. In several ways the play is puzzling, and disquieting as is none of the others” (T. S. Eliot, “Hamlet,” Selected Essays: 1917–1932 [New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1932], 123).Yet despite these “failures,” if such they be, the popularity of the play remains unabated. 13. Especially here: These [Romantic] minds often find in Hamlet a vicarious existence for their own artistic realization. Such a mind had Goethe, who made of Hamlet a Werther; and such had Coleridge, who made of Hamlet a Coleridge; and probably neither of these men in writing about Hamlet remembered that his first business was to study a work of art. The kind of criticism that Goethe and Coleridge produced, in writing of Hamlet, is the most misleading kind possible. For they both possessed unquestionable critical insight, and both make their critical aberra-

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logos tions the more plausible by the substitution—of their own Hamlet for Shakespeare’s—which their creative gift effects. We should be thankful that Walter Pater did not fix his attention on this play. (Ibid., 121) All true, all wittily sarcastic; but Eliot missed the eschatological setting of the play, which, I hold in this article, goes far to explaining the alleged “failure” of the play. 14. Paul Cantor, Shakespeare: Hamlet, Landmarks of World Literature, Second Editions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 38. 15. Ibid., 37–38. 16. Ibid., 38. 17. Ibid. 18. Ibid., 39. 19. Stephen Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001). To exonerate Cantor a bit, the first edition of his book on Hamlet came out in 1989; in the preface to the second edition of 2004 he notes Greenblatt’s book and admits the legitimacy of its argumentation, without, however, taking it into account much in his own stress on the Renaissance context of the play. 20. Not only doctrine, then, but also chants, gestures, images, and the very air that the faithful breathed said the same thing: the border between this world and the afterlife was not simply and irrevocably closed. For a large group of mortals— perhaps the majority of them—time did not come to an end at the moment of death. The book was not quite shut. One chapter remained to be written, and if the outcome was fixed and settled, the sequence of events, the duration, and the quality of the experience were not. The living could have an ongoing relationship with one important segment of the dead, and not simply a relationship constituted by memory.There were things the living could do for the dead—and not to do these things, or to delay doing them, or to do some and not others, was also a course of action in this ongoing relationship. The whole social and economic importance of Purgatory in Catholic Europe rested on the belief that prayers, fasts, almsgiving, and masses constituted a valuable commodity—‘suffrages,’ as they were termed—that could in effect be purchased, directly or indirectly, on behalf of specific dead persons. (Ibid., 18–19) 21. In what follows, I shall use the term “Reformers” or “Reformed” (with capital R) to refer generically to all Protestants (including Lutherans) and not more specifically to the Calvinist school, although, as it happens, most polemics written in English were Reformed in the specific sense. But since Luther eventually (after some initial wavering) came to reject purgatory, and because he launched the Reformation, and because his personality has been so clearly, at least in broad outlines, reflected in Hamlet’s own eschatological dilemmas, I think it best to treat the Reformation broadly, since there were no differences between the various Reformers on the key points that Hamlet is meant to illuminate. 22. Even after he has confirmed (to his satisfaction: see the next paragraph) the veracity of the ghost’s report, he never loses the lessons he learned in Wittenberg. Early

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23. 24. 25.

26.

27.

28. 29.

30. 31. 32.

in his reforming career, Luther denied free will in a famous dispute with Erasmus. In the last scene in the play, Hamlet too denies free will: “If Hamlet from himself be ta’en away [by madness], and when he’s not himself does wrong Laertes, then Hamlet does it not. Hamlet denies it” (5.2.218–22). Hamlet gives the revised version of the play the private, facetiously meant title “The Mousetrap,” but here merely added lines to an already existing script. Craig Bernthal, The Trial of Man: Christianity and Judgment in the World of Shakespeare (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2003), 69–70. Ibid., 61. Of course, such a temporarily released purgatorial soul, even if conceivable, would not be adding to his time in purgatory by encouraging his earthly son to commit a mortal sin but would be dispatching his own soul to hell, an obvious impossibility, since one cannot add to one’s list of sins after death. Thus the ghostly charge should automatically indicate to young Hamlet the ghost’s hellish provenance. But it doesn’t.Why? To be fair to Greenblatt, he too recognizes the dilemma: “Shouldn’t souls in Purgatory be getting more charitable than less?” (Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory, 251). Here again we see how Hamlet represents a volatile and uneasy mixture of Christian values and the conventions of revenge tragedy. Even if Denmark had an elective monarchy, as seems presupposed by the plot, Hamlet would still feel justified in holding the “election” obviously invalid. And with Claudius rightfully overthrown, no other candidate seems available. (Hamlet becomes convinced of the guilt of his uncle long before Fortinbras threatens Denmark with his invasion.) Claudius’s already dubious claims to the throne are compounded by the threats to his kingdom from abroad. A consistent subtheme of the play is the threat from Norway, which the guards of the night vigil speak of in the first scene of the play, and which Shakespeare continues to keep in the mind of the audience with Claudius’s on-again, off-again diplomatic efforts to keep the waxing Norwegian power at bay. Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory, 279. Harold Bloom, Shakespeare:The Invention of the Human (New York: Riverhead Books, 1998), 404. At a minimum, this observation points to the fact that Shakespeare is not presenting a tendentious, polemical portrait of Luther but is asking us to delve into the reasons that disputes between Catholics and Protestants over the afterlife remain so impossible to resolve. Robert Miola, “Shakespeare’s Religion,” First Things no. 183 (May 2008): 25–30; here 27, 28. Edward Oakes, “Shakespeare’s Millennium,” First Things no. 98 (December 1999): 17–24. I could also mention the fate of some of his schoolmasters at Stratford: Recent research has also uncovered a plethora of evidence pointing to the Catholic and Jesuit sympathies of most of Shakespeare’s schoolmasters. Simon Hunt, Shakespeare’s first teacher, for example, left his position in 1575 to become a Jesuit priest. One of Shakespeare’s fellow pupils, Robert Debdale by name, was

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33.

34.

34. 35.

executed as a priest in 1586; while studying for the priesthood Debdale shared classes with Thomas Cottom (executed in 1582), whose brother John Cottom was a schoolmaster at Stratford and taught Shakespeare until, under mounting anti-Catholic pressure from the Crown, he fled home to Lancashire, a Catholic stronghold. Shortly after that, at least according to some scholarly speculation, Shakespeare took up a position, presumably at Cottom’s recommendation, as a tutor and player in the Houghton household, a recusant Lancashire family whose property neighbored Cottom’s. From the will of one of this family, Alexander Houghton, we know that this family maintained a company of players, for Alexander bequeathed his stock of costumes and musical instruments to a neighbor, one Sir Thomas Hesketh. As it happens, the Heskeths are mentioned as frequent guests in the hospitality book of the Earl of Derby, the most powerful peer of that region; perhaps it is sheer coincidence, but the son of the fourth Earl of Derby was Ferdinando Stanley, later Lord Strange, whose company of players performed four of Shakespeare’s early plays and five of whose members formed the nucleus of the Chamberlain’s Men (later called the King’s Men when King James I assumed patronage of the company), which Shakespeare joined at its inception and for whom he wrote all the rest of his plays. (Ibid.) Religion’s inability to verify itself was also the gravamen of Gottfried Lessing’s famous parable of Nathan the Wise, who counseled a king who had three sons whom he loved equally but whose kingdom was entailed (meaning could be bequeathed to only one son). Not wishing to show favoritism, he had two duplicates made of the state ring (indicating the true king) and gave an identical-seeming ring to each son, telling each in his will to go out to the world for one year. Upon their return, the son who ended up doing the most good for the human race would be the true heir. Thus Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all claim exclusive “rights” to the revelation of God, whose mutually exclusive claims could only be adjudicated by looking at the behavior of their adherents. Of course, as Pope Benedict XVI’s speech in Regensburg so vividly showed, such a program works only if the adherents of the three monotheistic religions agree to the supremacy of humanitarian ethics over their own versions of revelation. In other words, Hamlet’s tragedy is also our own. It has long been noted that Hamlet contradicts himself when he says that the dead soul enters a realm “from whose bourn no traveler returns” while simultaneously seeking out independent corroboration of the ghost’s veracity. True enough, but that is the whole point of the play, as Greenblatt notes: “Purgatory forged a different kind of link between the living and the dead, or, rather, it enabled the dead to be not completely dead—not as utterly gone, finished, complete as those whose souls resided forever in Hell or Heaven” (Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory, 17). If, as the Reformers held, there is only heaven and hell after death, then indeed no “traveler” there can return. But that doctrine is the very point at issue that the ghost has called into question. Ibid., 37–38. Ibid., 253.