Hamlet & Theology
From the Hamlet Sunday Night Lecture Series
Part of BTE’s Theatre School
Hamlet & Theology –
By Ann Keeler Evans, M.Div. With a Lot of Help from My Friends
I’m an interesting choice to talk about the theology of Hamlet. As a theologian, I’m a practical one. I’m better at talking how the rubber meets the road of your theological values than I am at discussing theological movements. I hadn’t seen Hamlet since I saw it in the Danish Opera House (as an opera), which I attended with the choir from the Swedish school I attended in 1970. My biggest question at the end of that performance concerned an American woman seated two rows in front of me with curlers in her hair and one of those little triangular scarves tied over it, which did nothing to cover it. My classmates were horrified. No Scandinavian would ever have appeared in public in rollers. I was more fascinated trying to discern where she might possibly have been going that was more important than here. After all, the Queen was but a couple of balconies away.
It was problematic to think about how to organize this; it’s all so interwoven. I finally decided to list what I see to be the questions and themes. Then we can come back and pick them apart. I began to see my task as a person confronted by a knitting basket with wildly tangled yarns. You pull a little on this thread and then a little on the next, eventually you get to the knot where decision have to be made about whether you continue to pick, or in fact cut. Remind you of anything? I don’t have a lot of “expert opinions,” I’m going to give a few thoughts, may be 15 minutes worth and then I’ll pass the metaphorical knitting basket around and let you pick up the skein you’re most willing to wind toward clarity. And should we run out of things to discuss, we can always come back to the vexing Hamlet/roller question.
Before identifying topics, we need to consider whose theology, from which era, we’ll look at the problems. We can’t read too much contemporary theology into this because our worldview is so incredibly different. Not only were Catholicism and Protestantism very different, even our Protestants and Catholics now hold a somewhat Post-Christian world-view.
Much of this story outlines struggles between Catholic and Protestant understandings of relationships to God and action. These were the theologies extant at the time Shakespeare was writing. (Certainly there are questions about theological leanings. Was he a cypto-Catholic? His father had died in the year he wrote this play and left his will in a Catholic format. Don’t ask I don’t know.) In the play, Laertes and France represent a more Catholic viewpoint.
Hamlet, however, teeters in between, and at times represents both theologies. Additionally, there are a panoply of Gods invoked. So the Greco-Roman Ancient Theologies are part of the picture. Grecian philosophies add their influence. Although the play is set somewhere between the 13-15th centuries, depending upon which absolutely certain expert you use, the theological arguments are post Luther, and those which concerned, even consumed Elizabethan England.
What you or I might think is most important would be the question of murder. Is it divinely ordained or at least divinely accepted? This is a revenge play, certainly not new with Shakespeare. It’s not a particularly Christian theme, although at this point the Church certainly accommodated the fact that this was a brutal and treacherous world. But, I can’t really think of any place that Jesus said, “Go, get him!” However, the Greco-Roman gods and goddesses were very jealous of one another, and frequently quite violently eliminated rivals and wrongdoers.
The panel of Hamlet lovers that convened around me when I said I’d been asked to do this were wonderfully busy thinkers. We couldn’t help but notice that Claudius, however wrongfully he ascended the throne, now assumed a divine “rightness” and even divine protection about his kingship and his personage. But if the world is divinely ordained by God or the gods, was the right lineage of this kingdom in fact the Fortinbras lineage? Might part of the meaning/goal/not sure what the word is here of this play have been to return the reign of the region to Norway, of which it had been a part before it was assumed by Hamlet the Elder? Certainly in the end of the uncut version Hamlet acknowledges Fortinbras’ claim to the throne. (The director pointed out that in Scandinavia, this was a perfectly legitimate way to ascend the throne. In the original play the story was taken from, Claudius ran Hamlet the Elder through with a sword. The succession of kings was decided by a “thing” when the elders voted. So Hamlet might have succeeded, but equally well might not have… given who was strong enough to run Claudius through.)
1. One of the moments here accurate to history is the many thousand soldiers marching to procure a small plot of land. Expansion in the form of “Christianizing War” took place at the end of the Crusades to allow returning soldiers land. The Norwegians had surely been mercenaries in later crusades, but their main crusade under Sigurd I took place from 1107 to 1110. An excess of soldiers continued because the church had had a great PR campaign to raise so many soldiers that they were having problems talking people out of being soldiers. So they would have had the problem of newly noble knights and no land. That increased the pressure when losses of the size of Elsinore occurred.
2. Ernest Johnson says, “the dilemma of Hamlet the Prince and Man” is “to disentangle himself from the temptation to wreak justice for the wrong reasons and in evil passion, and to do what he must do at last for the pure sake of justice. From that dilemma of wrong feelings and right actions, he ultimately emerges, solving the problem by attaining a proper state of mind.”
So Hamlet’s incessant agonizing (in most wondrous language) is an effort to discern whether the case was truly laid for retribution on Claudius. Hamlet had a laundry list of the times acceptable to kill Claudius and the times when it was not. In the end, he couldn’t/didn’t kill Claudius for his father; he killed him for his mother. There was no ambiguity about Claudius’ responsibility for her death.
Hamlet was a Stoic. He was not a passion-filled man. He was a thinker. He was being educated in Wittenburg, where Luther had taught at some 60 years before the writing of this play. Stoicism was one of the revived Greek philosophies at that time. Weighing and deliberating would have been appropriate.
Stoicism as discussed in the Standard Dictionary of Philosophy (and to my shame, Wikipedia) concerned itself with the active relationship between cosmic determinism (Fortinbras’ claim) and human freedom, (Hamlet the Elder) and the belief that it is virtuous to maintain a will (called prohairesis) that is in accord with nature. The Stoics considered destructive emotions to be the result of errors in judgment, and that a sage, or person of “moral and intellectual perfection,” would not undergo such emotions.[1] Because of this, the Stoics presented their philosophy as a way of life, and they thought that the best indication of an individual’s philosophy was not what a person said but how he behaved.
So how one determines right action is really a crucial theological journey for the Prince, that exists outside the revenge motif.
4. Purgatory. This is not really a question for many of us. Most modern day Catholics believe more strongly in reincarnation, which is totally not Catholic, than they do about Purgatory. But this was a live issue. Purgatory had its beginning in crowd control. . Poor people had horrible lives. The promise of a pleasurable afterlife was helpful in keeping people constrained. And those brutal lives were ascribed to an all-powerful God. Plagues and famines were God’s will and exploited by the ecclesiastical hierarchy. Purgatory was a middle way; it was “frightening but redemptive.”
As a Protestant, Hamlet would have rejected Purgatory. So his father’s appearance would have been really problematic. If this were a true seeing, then the notion of Purgatory, antithetical to all his beliefs, was true, ergo Catholicism was right. If it were the devil, well then, hell was well accepted by both! But the ghost could be listened to if Purgatory existed. The words of the Father to enact age-old justice for revenge must be heeded.
There were times I wondered if Hamlet the Elder’s Purgatory were not reflected in Hamlet the Younger’s rationalism. He could not move until the situation played itself out and made itself clear. It is tempting from our vantage point to roll the eyes and disdain the tedious, if incredibly powerfully written and proclaimed, backing and forth-ing. Anyone who’s been a sophomore understands the existential angst. Anyone who’s been a sophomore is glad to have moved on. But to move too quickly past that is to ignore the importance of Philosophical and religious movements. Our world view is different today than theirs, for so many reasons. Now our response to the questions Hamlet raises about why to exist would be pointed toward an answer about the wonders of the world. At that point, it was noted that we don’t know what comes next. It could be worse.
Today, we look at the question of ghosts and think about the supernatural. Our notion of ghosts is people drifting around who never “moved on.” Go visit the consistory and take their ghost tour (6). But I’m not sure that that’s a good representation of this play. This “shade” had a purpose, not only in the play, but also in Purgatory. He was compensating for his sins since he was not a man who had had the final forgiveness of the priest. He was not “shriven” meaning he had not made confession and been absolved. He had much for which to atone, perhaps the theft of this tiny kingdom. In the mind of a young Protestant, ghosts could only exist because Purgatory existed.
5. Murder most foul. When is it ok? Again, it’s easy from a protected vantage point to say “Murder is never ok.” But when deeds transgress life, or threaten to do so, what is the appropriate response. And what happens when you do it. The most direct grappling I found on this topic was from NPR’s This American Life, which conducted interviews with prisoners in the Missouri Eastern Correctional System who had grappled with murder and were living with the consequences of having acted. Big Hutch who played Horatio, thought Hamlet was a dithering wuss (not his words!) He does your daddy; you do him. End of story. That Horatio felt that Laertes understood the question better. (if you haven’t heard that piece, it’s well worth listening to, if for no other reason than it reminds you how a different worldview causes you to choose different questions as the central question).
But in the time in which the story is set and as well as in Shakespeare’s time, this is how kingdoms were decided and wrongs were avenged or punished. There’s a certain immediacy to life that certainly the prisoner’s could understand. But Hamlet focuses on the consequences of his actions. Back to our prisoners, consequences were understood on a whole host of levels. From Hutch’s “do the crime do your time” mentality to one of the Hamlet’s feeling as if he were actively engaged in understanding what the loss of life meant to the person he had killed.
6. The last question I want to touch on is the question of the women. I can’t be too angry about the fact that Shakespeare presents both Ophelia and Gertrude as objects to be acted upon. They were chattel. But the question that they raise legitimately, although, not one that concerned Shakespeare, was what happens to people who are completely marginalized, whose voices are extinguished? In today’s world, in the milieu represented within this event, where we’re more aware of different worldviews, there can be no assumption that it’s ok to marginalize or drown out dissenting viewpoints. People talk about how he loved her. But there was no thought until Laertes that he might have deprived a family of her father. He was sorry for her death but never concerned about his part in her hysteria.
I’m going to stop here and pass the basket. What skein of thought looks most interesting to you among these? What am I missing?
