The Protestant Performer

by guest author The Politicrat

Reflections of the Reformation in Shakespeare’s Hamlet

One of the most unique aspects of literature as a medium of art is that it is both timeless and for its time. Although the great literary works of history have, throughout the ages, come to transcend time itself and often come to take on new meaning for each generation of critics and general readers alike, it is nonetheless important for us to remember the context of the time and place in which these works were written. All works are inherently, at their core, reflections of the world of the author — commentaries on the events, the cultures, and the social anxieties defining of the author’s contemporary age. The Epic of Gilgamesh is not merely a meditation on friendship; it is also a commentary on the explicit fear of death embedded within the ancient Sumerian religion. Homer’s Odyssey is an analysis of the social and political structures of Dark Age Greece, even though the events described took place centuries earlier. Dante’s Divine Comedy is a commentary on the medieval understanding of free will, sin, and virtue. Even such works of nonfiction as Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West reflect the pessimistic zeitgeist which pervaded Europe during the interwar period, and are riddled with the very same themes as contemporary works of fiction like The Waste Land, Ulysses, and The Great Gatsby. Whether consciously or subconsciously, all pieces of literature are expressions of their authors’ own time. The works of Shakespeare are no different.

To say that Shakespeare’s time was an era of immense cultural change and social strife would be a massive understatement. During this period, not just England, but the whole of Europe, was in the midst of the Protestant Reformation, which was the underlying impetus for all of the bloody wars, political and institutional shakeups, and intellectual movements throughout much of the 16th and 17th centuries. Although this is more evident in the works of such authors as John Donne or John Milton, it more subtly pervades the works of William Shakespeare.

Despite such subtleties, nowhere in Shakespeare’s catalogue of plays are these themes of the Protestant Reformation more apparent than in Hamlet, written somewhere around 1600. What appears on the surface a mere tragedy about a Danish prince hell-bent on avenging his father’s death in an attempt to reclaim his rightful throne from his usurping Uncle Claudius is, in fact, a complex commentary on 1) the sociopolitical and religious upheavals of the Reformation in Northern Europe and 2) the philosophical differences between the Protestantism of Martin Luther and the Catholicism of the Medieval Church. While these subjects are found throughout nearly every element of the play, they are most reflected in the Northern European setting, the ways in which the play discusses the themes of death, and the philosophical struggle between the ideas of free will and determinism — all in the context of Shakespeare’s portrayal of Hamlet as the quintessential Protestant reformer.

Setting & Historical Context

The setting of Hamlet is particularly significant to the Reformation themes. First, it is important to note that Hamlet himself is based on the ancient Norse figure of Amleth, a Viking hero whose legends date back to the 10th or 11th centuries. The setting of Denmark is thoroughly Christianized in the play, however, and set in the 12th or 13th century. The setting is also significant in that it symbolizes the entirety of Northern Europe, where Protestantism most powerfully cemented itself. The first indication of Hamlet as a Protestant figure is that he had been studying in Wittenberg, which was ground zero for the Reformation. This was where Martin Luther taught, and it was the location of the church on whose door he nailed his infamous Ninety-Five Theses in 1517. Shakespeare’s contemporary audience would have inferred, despite the anachronisms, that Hamlet would have received a Protestant education, and that upon returning home he would have brought that worldview with him.

Upon Hamlet’s return, things have changed. Not only does he learn that his father has died and that his mother has married his uncle, but he also sees the court in a whole new light, as something inherently cynical and corrupt. This may be seen as an allegory for how the earliest Protestant reformers viewed the Catholic culture of the late 15th and early 16th centuries. Hamlet, like the reformers, becomes disillusioned with the society in which he had been brought up and broadly distances himself from others, which his mother, his uncle, Horatio, Ophelia, and Polonius — all of them Catholic in their sensibilities — find troubling. Hamlet’s concern for revenge, on a subliminal level, is allegorical for his iconoclastic desire to purge Denmark of its Catholic influences.

Cultural Context & Courtly Love

The notion of “performance” is another major theme in Hamlet, exemplified both in the theatrics of the titular character and in the underlying theme of “the world being a stage” — a theme which runs through many of Shakespeare’s plays. The height of this theme in Hamlet occurs when Hamlet acts alongside the troubadours. Troubadours are often perceived as being a precursor to the secular musicians that arose during the Renaissance and the Protestant Reformation, and as such often found themselves persecuted by the Church. Hamlet wholeheartedly embraces them, but they are viewed as trivial by much of the rest of the court. Hamlet’s participation in their antics is off-putting to people such as his mother and uncle, who interpret it as a sign of Hamlet’s descent into madness. Hamlet, however, is well aware of what he is doing. In many ways, his embracing of the troubadours is deliberate: despite the fact that he is “performing,” he is quite sincere in his performance, which is an expression of his admiration for them and his admiration for the theological underpinnings of Protestantism, much to the dismay of his friends and family.

The setting of the Danish court is, to say the least, anachronistic: instead of resembling a feudal monarchy, it is represented as being a Renaissance court not unlike that of Queen Elizabeth, while the culture of the court still exhibits 14th-century motifs. In Hamlet’s character, the worldview that he has brought with him from Wittenberg is implied, as is an inherently European Catholic ideal that was prevalent throughout much of High Medieval literature — that of courtly love. Courtly love was a convention and literary motif emphasizing the unconditional love and sense of loyalty that a knight or noble has for his lady. The cultural tradition itself, which spawned from poets who lived around the time of the Crusades, suggested that a vassal should have a relationship with the wife of his lord almost parallel to that which he has with the lord himself. However, Hamlet subverts this theme wholeheartedly. First, the married lady at whom Hamlet’s courtly love is directed is his own mother, who has wed his uncle while he was away studying in Wittenberg. Second, the notion of courtly love was typically presented in a positive light throughout most of medieval literature, whereas Shakespeare characterizes it as the cause of the kingdom’s downfall and, moreover, the downfall of Hamlet himself. This is, however, not the first time that this theme has been touched upon in the troubadour tradition, as will be discussed later on.

The theme of courtly love underlies much of Shakespeare’s theatrical catalogue, but it was always something that Shakespeare subverted. In some of his earlier plays, such as Love’s Labour Lost and The Two Gentlemen of Verona, courtly love is satirized for comical effect. The ideal of courtly love is often still depicted as sincere, particularly in the character of Rosalind in As You Like It, wherein Rosalind eventually criticizes aspects of the ideal as superficial while praising its sincere moral considerations for fidelity. By the time Shakespeare wrote plays like A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Twelfth Night, the notion is not so much satirized as it is simply played for laughs. While courtly love itself is not so much the theme of Romeo and Juliet, it does represent a turn in how Shakespeare depicts romance. It is not until the late 16th and early 17th centuries, however, that Shakespeare starts to deconstruct and deromanticize the trope of courtly love by incorporating aspects of realism, particularly in how the pursuit of such an ideal can result in tragedy. We see this theme throughout Hamlet.

While courtly love was seen in a positive light by both the medieval bards (who invented the motif) and, later, the troubadours (as an ideal), only the latter group characterized it as a folly. Breaking from the medieval tradition, the troubadours depicted courtly love as a sort of Faustian bargain that could be the source of a kingdom’s ruin, because the only logical end result would be for the knight and his queen to commit an act of adultery.

This tragically dark interpretation is found more frequently in the English literary tradition than in that of, say, the French. English writers and poets often seemed to emphasize its evil consequences, as Geoffrey Chaucer notably does in his Canterbury Tales. But nowhere is this more apparent than in Arthurian Legend, wherein Lancelot and Guinevere’s relationship goes down that path and ultimately leads Camelot to ruin. This can be read in two ways in Shakespeare’s Hamlet: first, in that the supposed betrayal by Hamlet’s mother in her marrying of Claudius, seen as adultery in the eyes of Hamlet, is the impetus for Hamlet’s revenge (which directly brings about the fall of his kingdom); and second, in that Hamlet’s borderline-incestuous affection for his mother, and the accompanying jealousy, is one of the prime motivating factors for Hamlet to embark upon his quest for revenge. In the end, though, Hamlet’s demise symbolizes the death of this ideal — a product of medieval, Catholic Europe — and that of the rest of the old cultural conventions of the Middle Ages. Much like a reformer seeking to address the flaws of the Church’s doctrine, Hamlet inadvertently exposes the faults of the ideal of courtly love in his contradictory quest to rid Denmark of his uncle’s rule all the while attempting to live up to many of its courtly traditions.

Eschatology & Theme of Death

Death is a common theme in all of Shakespeare’s tragedies. Hamlet is certainly no exception. Moreover, the play is specifically a literary rumination on the idea of death itself and the two widely contrasting Catholic and Protestant conceptions of it. Nowhere is this more exemplified than in the character of the ghost of Hamlet’s father. King Hamlet can be read in a number of ways. For the sake of the story, he is essentially a representative of the Christian notion of Purgatory: he is in neither Heaven nor Hell, instead roaming the world as a spirit. One of the prime causes behind the Protestant Reformation was this medieval doctrine. In Roman Catholicism, Purgatory is the location where the majority of Christian souls go after they die. The people who are sent there have lived essentially good lives, but not lives good enough to deserve to go directly to Heaven, and so they are condemned there for a time to undergo a period of “purging.” There is no question that the ghostly state of Hamlet’s father represents Purgatory, as is reflected in the ghost’s own words:

A certain term of penance I must endure

The foul crimes done in my days of nature

Are burnt and purged away. (1.5)

The appearance of King Hamlet’s ghost to his son, and the manner in which he does so, is highly authentic to Catholic theology. Sir Thomas More lays this out very succinctly in his 1529 treatise The Supplication of Souls:

If ye pity the blind, there is none so blind as we, which are here in the dark, saving for sights unpleasant, and loathsome, till some comfort come. If ye pity the lame, there is none so lame as we, that neither can creep one foot out of the fire, nor have one hand at liberty to defend our face from the flame. Finally, if we pity any man in pain, never knew ye pain comparable to our; whose fire as far passeth in heat all the fires that ever burned upon the earth, as the hottest of all those passeth a feigned fire painted on a wall.

Here, More is describing one of the fundamental features of Purgatory, namely the idea that those who are condemned to Purgatory often appeal to the living for prayer. Yet despite the indisputably Catholic imagery present within the character of King Hamlet’s ghost, Shakespeare subverts it. Rather than beseech Hamlet to pray for his soul, he urges his son to avenge his death — an atypical request from a ghost supposedly confined to Purgatory. However, this is really only contradictory on the surface. Instead, the ghost’s urging Hamlet to avenge him should be read as his asking Hamlet to restore the rightful order of the monarchy before it falls into chaos. Despite the Catholicism of Hamlet’s friends and family, the ghost of his father is concerned that the kingship of Claudius makes the court susceptible to Protestant sensibilities, and that Hamlet’s agreeing to carry out revenge on behalf of his father is indicative of Hamlet’s residual attachment to the tradition of his father and a certain lingering obligation to the Catholic Church. Therefore, this would imply that Hamlet’s internal conflict throughout the play is, in fact, his struggle to reconcile his newfound Protestant sensibilities with his implicit loyalty to the Catholic Church.

While Hamlet’s Protestantism is evident up until this point, his Protestantism becomes challenged the moment that his father’s ghost reveals itself, thus effectively conveying to Hamlet the reality of Purgatory that he has heretofore denied. This is ironic, in that much of Hamlet’s conflict is derived from his affection and devotion for his father, despite the fact that he is Protestant and his father’s ghost is seemingly Catholic in essence. Now, we could ultimately contend that the ghost merely possesses the veneer of Catholicism and is in fact a deeper symbol of Protestantism as well, with the mission he gives to Hamlet being a metaphor for the call to Reformation. While certainly a compelling thesis, this would still ignore 1) that Hamlet himself returned to Denmark from Wittenberg with a worldview vastly different from that of his father or anybody else in the court and 2) that Hamlet’s actions throughout the play ultimately have the effect of establishing a new paradigm that contrasts with the regimes of his uncle and, implicitly, his father. This argument also falls flat when one considers the fact that King Hamlet’s ghost outright declares that he is in Purgatory, which should be read at face value. To that end, the ghost is best read as a devout Catholic sentenced to Purgatory, Prince Hamlet as a conflicted but committed Protestant, and Claudius as a conflicted Catholic ripe for Protestantism. The mission that King Hamlet’s ghost gives to Hamlet is to ensure that Claudius — the inevitable Protestant — be sent to Hell before he confesses his sins, of which Claudius is himself skeptical but not yet well aware of its implications insofar as salvation is concerned. Ergo, King Hamlet’s ghost is not a Protestant who gives his son a Protestant mission, but a Catholic who gives his son a Catholic mission while being completely oblivious to the fact that his son is actually a Protestant.

Hamlet’s struggle to reconcile his newfound knowledge of Purgatory’s existence with his Protestantism is the source of his descent into madness. He wants revenge, but his indecision over whether to carry it out is suggestive of his internal struggle, which in reality is between his dedication to Protestantism and his loyalty to the Catholic tradition in which he was raised.

Other than Purgatory, one of the biggest theological differences between Catholicism and Protestantism concerns the nature of salvation. In traditional Christianity, salvation is dependent upon both faith and good works; in order to make it to Heaven, one must not only believe in Christ, but also live a life of good deeds through purposeful action, lest belief be rendered meaningless. In Protestantism, salvation is attained through faith alone. Like Hamlet, Claudius is also having a crisis of faith, but the difference is that it is solely within the context of his Catholic faith, which is wavering. Claudius has a guilty conscience from killing his own brother and taking the throne. He is the Cain to King Hamlet’s Abel. Moreover, what makes his fratricide all the more sinful is that he went against God’s own divine will, according to which his older brother was the rightful king. This idea of “conscience” is a theme that shows up multiple times throughout the duration of Hamlet. The definition of “conscience” in Hamlet is frequently misunderstood, often mistaken to mean “self-reflection” or even “consciousness.” This is not the case; it is far more straightforward than that. Instead, “conscience” refers to one’s self-awareness of right from wrong, virtue from vice, salvation from damnation… It implies a certain fear of what will happen to one’s soul after committing a mortal sin.

In Act III, Scene III, Hamlet hides from sight while his uncle prays. As he watches and listens, Hamlet learns that his uncle is aware of his guilty conscience. He knows that he has committed evil by killing his brother. But because Claudius is so entrenched within his works-based Catholicism, he cannot in his right mind ask for forgiveness, or even confess his sins, despite being a devout Christian and believer in God. In so watching, Hamlet opts not to strike at his uncle and send him to Hell. It is almost as though Hamlet views Claudius’s soul as being one that is primed for Protestantism — something that the ghost of his father fears — and that he need only discover God’s grace in order to cleanse his soul. Hamlet harbors no great love for his uncle, but the fact that he does not kill Claudius demonstrates that Hamlet himself would rather not risk his own soul going to Hell, and also that he possesses a certain pity for Claudius. By killing his uncle and thus putting to death a potential soul who is ripe for Protestantism — which would have the intended result of preserving the stable, Catholic order that his father’s ghost wants — he would be no better than his uncle the killer. In other words, it is a theological paradox.

This paradox is explored as Hamlet’s internal struggle reaches its highest point, when Hamlet famously proclaims, “To be, or not to be?” The ensuing soliloquy follows Hamlet as he contemplates suicide. The anxiety, the distress of his predicament, has overwhelmed Hamlet ever since meeting his father’s ghost and beginning his quest for revenge. The anxiety has become too heavy to bear — hellish in its own way. Although he has had many chances by this point in the play, Hamlet has not been able to bring himself to kill his uncle and avenge his father, symbolic of his Protestant worldview, which he knows is holding him back from doing the deed. But he hates that this is the case. He does not want to kill Claudius. He wants to want to kill Claudius; he simply cannot will himself to do it. That Hamlet lacks this will is the heart of Hamlet’s crisis. In lacking such, Hamlet cannot help but feel that it is a sign of the inherent weakness of his own faith. The logical conclusion of this interpretation would therefore be that Hamlet’s own desire for suicide stems from his sense of helplessness.

Hamlet knows that he has a conscience but regrets that he does, making the indecision ever more difficult for him to contend with. “Conscience does make cowards of us all,” Hamlet declares in his soliloquy, and it is from this line that he makes known his greatest fear: being a coward. Not to follow through with killing his uncle is, in Hamlet’s eyes, cowardly. Yet suicide is equally a form of cowardice. While Hamlet is aware of his conscience, he feels as though it is a burden. Without it, he can just as easily go through with killing his uncle, but in doing so he risks eventually succumbing to the very same fate of Hell that will surely befall Claudius.

Still, Hamlet feels all the more helpless in that he simply cannot will himself to end his own life. He knows deep down that he will go to Hell if he murders his uncle, but also feels that he will be killed by Claudius if he does nothing. Hamlet’s doing nothing might result in his going to Heaven on account of his innocence, but he will still die. Yet to him, living a life of indecision is a Hell in itself. By releasing himself from this Hell, he risks damning himself to Hell. Suicide is not merely a sin in the Catholic tradition, but in the Protestant one as well. And it is that fear of Hell which ultimately deters him from taking his own life.

In The Sacred Art of Shakespeare, British Shakespeare scholar Martin Lings presents a compelling analysis of Hamlet’s evolution as a character as it relates to his spiritual development. As Lings sees it, Hamlet is the story of its titular hero’s quest for spiritual wisdom, as he attempts to detach himself from the trivial matters of the world in order to obtain knowledge of a greater religious truth. Lings asserts that, to the world, spiritual wisdom is madness. As we have established already, Hamlet’s madness is the manifestation of his internal struggle between his Protestant sensibilities and his Catholic upbringing. The more and more overwhelmed Hamlet becomes due to this struggle, the more and more he distances himself from his friends and family and the more bizarre to them he appears. Whether Hamlet is literally mad in the context of the story is beside the point. What matters is that his descent into madness and detachment from the world is a metaphor for his progression towards obtaining a greater spiritual truth, which nobody else understands — hence, why he is rendered “mad” by his friends and family. Regarding this progression, Lings says:

In his soliloquies, Hamlet shows no trace of madness, but as soon as he has to face the world, when Horatio enters, shortly after the exit of the Ghost, the newfound spiritual outlook which fills his soul almost bursting to a point has to find an outlet in what Horatio describes as “wild and whirling words.” It is under cover of this wildness that Shakespeare momentarily allows the deeper meaning of the play to come to the surface.

Martin Lings, The Sacred Art of Shakespeare: To Take Upon Us the Mystery of Things (Inner Traditions: 1998).

Lings also argues that Hamlet’s rejection of Ophelia represents the first stage of his spiritual journey, realizing that it is not possible to take the world with him while he continues on his path towards obtaining greater spiritual wisdom. In the context of his internal struggle, his rejection of Ophelia could also be regarded as his ultimate rejection of Catholicism. That would put a whole new meaning to Hamlet’s famous line “Get thee to a nunnery!” which by this reading could be interpreted as Hamlet’s swearing off the Catholic faith for good in a condescending manner. Furthermore, given the immense symbolic significance that Ophelia has, her death can be read as a metaphor for the death of Hamlet’s residual Catholicism. Ophelia’s death is tragic, to be sure, and it has a profound impact on Hamlet; but just as it hurts to lose someone, it is also painful to let go of both the past and the values that once defined you as a person.

Similarly, Martin Lings equates Ophelia’s burial with the burial of all that is worldly. Hamlet no longer has use for the world, which is precisely why he is prepared to die the following day. The typical reader may read this scene as being that where Hamlet is at his lowest — his maddest — but this “madness” is, in fact, not madness at all, but the full realization of spiritual truth. Ophelia’s madness, in contrast, is not like Hamlet’s at all. Again, Hamlet’s “madness” is clarity. Ophelia’s madness is, as Lings describes it, “like a mirror for the failure of all worldly aspirations, the shattering of all worldly hopes.” In other words, she is the pure personification of worldliness.

Free Will vs. Determinism

The final act of Hamlet showcases the ultimate victory of the Protestant worldview, particularly through the lens of the ideological struggle between two diametrically opposed interpretations of salvation: the metaphysical libertarianism of the Catholic faith, which stresses free will, and the fatalistic notion of predestination, which is at the heart of the Protestant outlook. In highlighting the similarities and differences between the character developments of Hamlet and Claudius, Hamlet’s “victory” in Act V all boils down to the fact that Hamlet has managed to appease his conscience by accepting the fatalism of Protestant predestination, whereas Claudius has not. Following in Luther’s footsteps, Hamlet rejects the Catholic notion of free will and realizes that it is, in fact, his duty — and his destiny — to destroy his uncle. Ironically, he wills himself to accept Protestantism, thus shedding away the power that allowed for him to accept it by his own volition (if he even actually made that decision at all). Hamlet’s speech in Act V, Scene II, represents a reaffirmation of the Protestant beliefs that he harbored at the beginning of the play upon his return to Denmark:

…There’s a special
providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ’tis not to
come. If it be not to come, it will be now. If it be now,
yet it will come. The readiness is all. Since no man knows
aught of what he leaves, what is’t to leave betimes? Let be. (5.2)

It would be best to interpret these words as Hamlet’s declaration of his newfound belief in the Protestant notion of Divine Providence. It is only through his faith in the notion of Divine Providence (a concept which first appeared in the Gospel of Matthew) that Hamlet is able to reconcile the killing of his uncle, which he vows to do in the name of Providence instead of his desire to avenge his father’s temporal authority. Instead of his father’s avenger, he becomes his Father’s avenger, seeking justice on behalf of Heaven, and thus capably achieving a “perfect conscience” while still being able to kill his uncle without the fear of being damned to Hell for murder. He knows that in doing so he will die anyway, so he reckons that if he must die, he will die for his convictions and for God. Hamlet does not kill his uncle for his father’s sake, but for his own — to cleanse his own soul. In killing his uncle, Hamlet thus fulfills his duty to God; his victory represents the triumph of the Protestant ideal of divine sovereignty.

Conclusion

Like many of Shakespeare’s works, Hamlet is a thematically multilayered play whose depth allows for a near-infinite number of interpretations. Over the centuries, it has been the subject of countless criticisms and analyses, each of which has offered its own unique perspective. However, while it would be misplaced to dismiss these various interpretations, it is also important that we first analyze Hamlet, as any work, in the context of the time and place in which it was written, taking into account the social, political, and religious climate of that particular period. Before scrutinizing such works through the lens of any modern sensibility, we must first examine it on the basis of its fundamental, intended themes — in Hamlet’s case, of the Protestant Reformation. Doing so allows us not only to gain deeper insight into the nature of such literary works themselves, but it also provides us with a better understanding of the sensibilities, anxieties, and cultures of the people who lived during the times in which these works were written.