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Vol I No. 10

Shakespeare's Hamlet and Prayer Book Spirituality

by
Neil G. Robertson

In stating that the plays of William Shakespeare are imbued with the spirituality of the Book of Common Prayer, the official order of religious ritual of the Elizabethan Church, I am not suggesting that Shakespeare simply applied or allegorized Prayer Book spirituality. His plays are clearly not directly religious, and indeed are often set in pre-Christian contexts; they are neither allegories of nor apologies for classical Anglicanism. But none of this prevents his works from being deeply Christian and specifically Anglican in their ethos and most basic assumptions. Indeed, it would be surprising if they were not, as this was the religious culture into which Shakespeare was born.

For many twenty-first century readers, it seems that Shakespeare has either no religious belief or those beliefs are irrelevant to interpreting or enjoying his plays. It is, of course, perfectly right to experience Shakespeare’s plays as essentially secular and as having an internal dramatic integrity that doesn’t point beyond the world of the play. For the point I want to make, I would insist on the worldliness of Shakespeare’s art. However, it is important to recognize this worldliness as that of the Renaissance, not a modern atheistic naturalism. Shakespeare’s dramatic world is never without a relation to the divine, even if that divinity is often in the background. My argument here is to suggest that Shakespeare’s plays bring about an invocation of the divine from out of that Renaissance worldliness which both corrects and points beyond that worldliness and in such a way that parallels the Book of Common Prayer, a religious and devotional manual which points its users to look beyond their own works to God’s providential will as the true source of redemption and godliness.

With the possible exception of Richard Hooker’s Lawes of the Ecclesiastical Polity, it is certainly the case that there is no systematic, magisterial theology that belongs to the Elizabethan Church. Classical Anglicanism rather points to what Robert Crouse calls the consensus fidelium, the ‘consensus of the faithful’ or ‘mind of the church’.1R. Crouse, ‘The Authority of the Thirty-Nine Articles Today’ in Richmond Bridge (ed), The Thirty-Nine Articles (St Peter’s Publication, Charlottetown, 1990). However, there are specifically Anglican formulations of this ‘mind of the Church’ in the Articles of Religion (1571) and the Book of Common Prayer. While both the Articles and Prayer Book are not without room for interpretation and have their various histories, it is evident (and has been more fully demonstrated in any number of fine papers published in this journal) that central to the spirituality of Classical Anglicanism is the distinction between faith and works, between justification and sanctification, between what Luther called alien and proper righteousness. This distinction, so articulated in the Reformation, belongs generally to the Augustinian tradition of the Latin Western Church and can be traced to its roots in Scripture – most especially the teaching of St Paul. At the time of the Anglican Reformation, the exact nature of the distinction between faith and works and how the two are to be related was a matter of significant debate; the specific formulations articulated by Cranmer, Hooker, and other Anglican divines and propounded in the Prayer Book and Articles are crucial in determining the Reformed Catholic character of Classical Anglicanism. For the purpose of this paper, we can put these specific formulations to one side and recognize that the Prayer Book and Articles articulate and work on the basis of this distinction between faith and works and that on the basis of that distinction works done without faith are of no spiritual efficacy (Article XIII).

I want to suggest that Shakespeare’s plays bring to light just such a distinction but in a secular, theatrical context, and I will illustrate this claim by examining Hamlet, Shakespeare’s most commented upon and performed play. On the surface, there are many reasons to discount my suggestion that we look to the Prayer Book and Articles to understand Hamlet. First, the play is set sometime in medieval Denmark and begins with the appearance of a ghost who is apparently trapped in Purgatory (contrary to the teaching of the Articles). Further, Hamlet is a student at the University of Wittenberg, famous as the place of origin of the Reformation, but there is no mention of Martin Luther. Indeed, Hamlet seems to present a largely medieval account of the afterlife, and the disposition of souls there. For some, this is evidence that, far from being a true member of the Church of England, Shakespeare was actually a crypto-Catholic. However, it is surely far too literal to assume that Shakespeare somehow identifies directly with the dramatic settings of his plays. I do not want to focus on the setting or background beliefs illustrated in his plays, which are famously problematic and involve any number of inconsistencies, anachronisms, or creative inventions (including geographic ones). Rather, I want to consider what we can call the ‘argument’ of the plays – here, specifically, the argument of Hamlet. My claim is that the argument of Hamlet provides a secular and dramatic parallel to what is religiously affirmed in the Prayer Book and Articles of the Elizabethan Settlement. My point is a simple one: both effect a crucial correction and repudiation of the spirituality of the Roman Catholic Church (as it was understood in the Renaissance).

While certainly proclaiming itself as a simple return to scripture, the Reformation was also a reaction to and repudiation of the soteriological claims of Rome – what she taught to be necessary for salvation. For the church of the Renaissance or Late Middle Ages, at the heart of salvation was what Alister McGrath refers to as a pactum understanding of the way in which God saved sinners.2A. McGrath, Luther’s Theology of the Cross Second Edition (Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), pp. 150–153. If we go back to the High Middle Ages, salvation was understood by figures like Thomas Aquinas as a perfecting of the human soul effected by grace, especially through the work of the church and the acquisition of theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity in the individual Christian (a view illustrated in Dante). For writers like Thomas à Kempis the church went beyond a sense that salvation occurred through the perfecting of the soul through grace to a much more unstable sense that there was no state of soul or human action that could secure God’s acceptance of the sinner into paradise. Rather, it all turned on God’s free determination. A kind of chasm arose between God and humanity which was only crossed by God’s ‘pact’ or deal, that if humans do quod in se, what is within them, then God will grant his mercy. This late medieval theology meant everything turned on one’s intention – one’s desire for God. Or to put this in a succinct formula: if you do your best, God will do the rest. Salvation revolves on one’s love or desire for God: doing one’s best, quod in se.

For figures like Luther, such a conditional understanding of grace and forgiveness, far from producing comfort, produced endless anxiety and a deepening sense that all of one’s works, all of one’s intentions, were inadequate; one’s best could never be known to be good enough for God. This is because built into the very effort to please God, to follow Christ, to imitate Christ, was a necessary dividedness: am I acting for God or for myself, for my salvation? So Luther would come to say that in such efforts to do ‘good works’ one was doubling one’s sin: the sin of the act itself as ungodly as the sin of believing it to be godly. Here is the way Article XIII describes works done before faith:

Works done before the grace of Christ, and the Inspiration of his Spirit, are not pleasant to God, forasmuch as they spring not of faith in Jesus Christ, neither do they make men meet to receive grace, or (as the School-authors say) deserve grace of congruity: yea rather, for that they are not done as God hath willed and commanded them to be done, we doubt not but they have the nature of sin.

One way to describe such ‘good works’, such efforts to achieve salvation by works, is that they have ‘fallen on the inventors’ heads’ (Hamlet 5, 2, 338). The liberation from being entrapped by ‘works righteousness’ afforded by the Reformation was through bringing out that all such efforts at human accomplishment done apart from the divine will or providence are frustrated and fruitless. The whole work of Article XVII, ‘Of Predestination and Election’ is to teach this: our salvation rests entirely in God and only insofar as by faith we accede to this absolute divine priority are we capable of sanctification through good works.

Classical Anglicanism knows this teaching to be both difficult and counterintuitive. It is for this reason Article XVII counsels against proclaiming this teaching to those whom the Article calls ‘carnal’, who may be left by it in a state of despair. Thus, there is a need for a purgation of our ‘carnality’, our deeply Renaissance sense that we are free, indeterminate, self-fashioning beings. Such a misconception is found in the work of the brilliant scholar Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. He expresses the Renaissance admiration of humanity in his alternative creation account found in the Oration on the Dignity of Man (1486):

Therefore He took up man, a work of indeterminate form; and placing him at the midpoint of the world, He spoke to him as follows:

‘We have given to thee, Adam, no fixed seat, no form of thy very own, no gift peculiarly thine, that thou mayest feel as thine own, have as thine own, possess as thine own the seat, the form, the gifts which thou thyself shalt desire … Thou like a judge appointed for being honorable art molder and maker of thyself; thou mayest sculpt thyself into whatever shape thou dost prefer.’3G. Pico della Mirandola, Oration on the Dignity of Man in Charles Glenn Wallis, Paul J.W. Miller, and Douglas Carmichael (trans) (Hackett Publishing Co., 1965), pp. 4–5.

For Luther and the Reformers, this heady sense of freedom is nothing but prideful vainglory that leads not to heaven on earth but to strife, conflict, and hell. Historically this was experienced, in the sixteenth century especially, as the failure of the Renaissance, not only by calls for reform but also by a turn to more cynical Machiavellian politics or withdrawal from public life by skeptics such as Michel de Montaigne. This sense of failure and despair in human works pointed Reformers such as Luther to the need for a radical purgation of human pride found in the doctrine of justification and prioritizing divine providence and predestination. It is only through this priority of God that there can be hope and a basis for properly good works.

When we turn to Hamlet, we find a play that brings to light a secular parallel to what is religiously taught by the Prayer Book. There are a multitude of interpretations and readings of the play (and really of any play) – an art form that is only completed in performance. Nonetheless, a fairly clear argument is being worked out in the play relevant to the crisis of the Renaissance as discussed above.4The reading offered here is informed by P. Epstein, ‘The Purgation of the Hero in Shakespearean Tragedy,’ Animus 3 (1998), pp. 3–29. There are in the play various indications that Hamlet, prior to the death of his father and the hasty marriage of his mother (all before the curtain rises on the play), was the model of a modern Renaissance humanist. Ophelia tells us of the change wrought by Hamlet’s grief:

O, what a noble mind is here o’erthrown! The courtier’s, soldier’s, scholar’s, eye, tongue, sword;
The expectancy and rose of the fair state, The glass of fashion and the mould of form, The observed of all observers, quite, quite down! (Hamlet 3, 1, 151–155)

Perhaps even more definite are Hamlet’s own words to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Hamlet invokes something like the image of human dignity described by Mirandola in his Oration on the Dignity of Man only to declare that he can no longer uphold this vision:

What a piece of work is a man!
how noble in reason!
how infinite in faculty!
in form and moving how express and admirable!
in action how like an angel!
in apprehension how like a god!
the beauty of the world!
the paragon of animals!

And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me: no, nor woman neither, though by your smiling you seem to say so. (Hamlet 2, 2, 203–309)

Hamlet here reiterates his condition, first made clear to us in our initial encounter with him, his state of deep melancholy – what we today would call depression – brought on by his father’s death and the failure of the Danish court to properly honor him in the too-hasty marriage of Claudius to his mother. Hamlet’s melancholy extends to a desire for suicide, restrained only by his recognition of divine prohibition. What Act I brings to light is the deep crisis Hamlet is faced with, a despair of the world of human action as incurably corrupt that embodies something of what I call the crisis of the Renaissance.

In Act I, not only is Hamlet filled with a melancholy that would have him withdraw from the world as an ‘unweeded garden’, but in direct contradiction to this he is confronted by his father’s murder and the demand of his father’s ghost that he pursue revenge. And so he promises that ghost:

Yea, from the table of my memory
I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records,
All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past, That youth and observation copied there; And thy commandment all alone shall live Within the book and volume of my brain, Unmix’d with baser matter: yes, by heaven! (Hamlet 1, 5, 91–104)

Act I put before us Hamlet’s deep problem: he is at once called to act in the very corrupt and corrupting world that he has declared his desire to escape. He captures his dilemma in these final words of the first act:

The time is out of joint: O cursed spite,
That ever I was born to set it right! (Hamlet 1, 5, 196–7)

Here the prince captures the very dilemma of the Renaissance as he seeks to act in a world where all good and right action is ensnared in its opposite – where setting things right necessarily places one in the midst of evil and self-corruption. The very nature of revenge is ensnared in the whole dilemma of Renaissance action or freedom: revenge is both an objective duty to right a wrong and a passion that seeks a subjective satisfaction. The very dividedness that Luther identified in ‘good works’ apart from faith is constitutive of revenge.

The body of the play is a working out of this problem as Hamlet finds himself incapable of bringing about the action that would ‘set things right’, the justified revenge for his father’s murder. This working out has two basic parts: (1) Hamlet establishing the guilt of Claudius, and (2) on the basis of this established guilt, his seeking to act to bring about a proper revenge. For Hamlet, this drama is driven inward, and in his deepening isolation he experiences all outer forms as corrupted: his king, his family in the person of his mother, his beloved (Ophelia, who rejects his advances), and his friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (corrupted by Claudius and the desire for Machiavellian control). Indeed, Claudius seems very much the Machiavellian who subordinates the state to private interest and advancement through the arts of force and fraud but claims it is all for the public good. As Hamlet seeks to establish Claudius’s guilt independent of the (potentially diabolical) testimony of the ghost, it is perfectly in accord with the argument of the play that it will only be through the ‘conscience of the King’, captured by a play within this play, that Hamlet can be assured of that guilt. And it is, of course, in the appeal to conscience that Hamlet turns away from the prospect of suicide in his famous ‘to be or not to be’ soliloquy.

Really, conscience is at the heart of the crisis of the Renaissance that I suggest is central to Hamlet. In this time, ‘conscience’ was understood not merely as an inner forum that determined matters of right and wrong, but as what we call ‘consciousness’. When Hamlet tells us that ‘conscience doth make cowards of us all’ he is not only speaking about our moral judgment but of our self-awareness in that judgment. What Hamlet is arguing in ‘to be or not to be’ is that there is in his self-awareness a mystery such that he cannot simply equate his consciousness to his worldly, bodily life. The ‘undiscovered country’ of death and his very awareness of it points him to possibilities within himself – within his conscience. Hamlet is often described as weak or ineffective – indeed he so characterizes himself – but this seems to misdiagnose the source of his incapacity to act. It is rather his inner greatness and depth that turns his duty of revenge into an inner crisis of conscience: Hamlet is seeking to unite the integrity of his conscience with the requirement to act in the world.

This is really a secular form of the question of good works faced by Anglican divines in the Prayer Book and Articles. If the action, the work, lies in my own finite will trying to realize itself in the corrupt world, how is this act capable of being held together with the integrity of my conscience; how is it a ‘good work’? One way of describing Hamlet’s whole inner conflict and incapacity to act is the manifestation of a divided conscience. It is his conscience that condemns the world as an ‘unweeded garden’ and it is his conscience that demands he ‘set things right’ by avenging his father’s death. The argument that runs through Acts II to IV bring Hamlet to a more and more explicit sense of the critical impasse of action on the assumption that it is up to him to ‘set things right’.

But to get more directly to the matter before us, let’s turn to the very end of the final act when Horatio summarizes the action of the play:

And let me speak to the yet unknowing world
How these things came about: so shall you hear
Of carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts,
Of accidental judgments, casual slaughters,
Of deaths put on by cunning and forced cause,
And, in this upshot, purposes mistook
Fall’n on the inventors’ heads: all this can I
Truly deliver. (Hamlet 5,2,332–9)

Horatio speaks of ‘purposes mistook’ or what Hamlet earlier referred to as ‘plots’ (Hamlet 5.2.9). The final Act of Hamlet brings to light Horatio’s point that ‘purposes’ or schemes fall on their inventors’ heads. The whole play has been a sustained reflection on plotting and counterplotting, above all between Hamlet and Claudius. The final act shows Claudius’s most complex and developed effort to plot the death of Hamlet, but in such a way as to preserve his own kingship and marriage through his manipulation of Laertes. On the other hand, through the main body of the play, Hamlet has been forced into counterplotting by his obligation to avenge his father’s death when he is without any direct remedy. He does this first by feigning madness to create a crisis in the royal court and by misdirecting as he seeks to establish Claudius’s guilt. Having captured the conscience of the king in The Mousetrap – the play within this play – Hamlet seeks to bring about a true or ‘just’ vengeance. But the play has shown Hamlet’s difficulty in achieving the union of thought and impulse necessary for such an action, first, by overthinking the circumstances afforded by his catching Claudius at ineffectual prayer and then, by impulsively killing Polonius in error. Hamlet seems incapable of uniting outer circumstances, thought, and feeling.

In Act V Hamlet comes to his crucial insight into the significance of this ineffectuality, and the ineffectuality of all ‘purposes’ or ‘plots’. This insight takes on a specifically theological dimension with the emergence of Hamlet’s use of the language of providence – twice invoked in Act V, scene 2. In the first instance, Hamlet describes his escape from Claudius’s earlier plot to have him killed on his mission to England in the company of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern:

Our indiscretion sometimes serves us well,
When our deep plots do pall: and that should teach us There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, Roughhew them how we will. (Hamlet 5, 2, 8–11)

Here Hamlet explicitly conjoins his seemingly happenstance discovery and reversal of Claudius’s plot (so ensuring that Claudius’s purposes are fallen on their inventor’s head) with his recognition of providence at work in the world. Hamlet sees that the failure and self-negating character of plotting brings to light a deeper divine agency in human action.

Even more significant is the exchange that Hamlet has with Horatio after Osric comes with Claudius’s proposal of a sporting duel between Laertes and Hamlet. Hamlet speaks of an apprehension he has about the proposed fight and Horatio suggests that if his mind dislikes it he should refuse. Of course, the audience knows the duel to be a plot and, in that sense, that support Horatio’s advice. But Hamlet says:

Not a whit, we defy augury: 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 not now, yet it will come: the readiness is all: since no man of aught he leaves, knows what is’t to leave betimes? (Hamlet 5,2,219-–224)

Here we have Hamlet’s developed position. He will not try to outsmart or outmaneuver Claudius’s plotting. Hamlet has moved beyond the logic of plotting – of seeking to effect an action in the world and so control its result to one’s advantage. Rather, Hamlet is suggesting that he needs to alter his framework for action so as to be ready for action as he is called upon by providence. His act, his ‘purpose’, is now derived from and grounded in the working out of providence. This is not quietism, but rather a shifting of the ground of his action from his own contrivance to the divinity that shapes his ends.

When we turn to the culmination of the play in the duel scene, it can all look like a complete trainwreck of accident and happenstance defying all purpose. But we discover, as Horatio recounts, that various purposes have fallen upon their inventors’ heads as Claudius and Laertes are caught in their own plots. But there is more: in Hamlet’s readiness, he effects fully and publicly his ‘vengeance’ which is purged of private satisfaction by his death and translated into an act of civic justice, thereby purging the rotten state of Denmark. We leave the theatre experiencing an outcome in which no human will was determinative yet there somehow was a comprehensive conclusion to the drama. In this conjoining of circumstance and justice, we experience theatrically the providence Hamlet invoked earlier in the scene. At once we share in Horatio’s deep grief at the death of his sweet prince but can also affirm with him the flights of angels that sing him to his rest. In short, we, the theatre audience, have joined in and been educated by the argument and action of Hamlet to see in secular life the need for a purgation that parallels that belonging to the spiritual instruction of the Book of Common Prayer: the conclusion of Hamlet points to a true political order as only possible once we are purged of the vain and indeterminate freedom of the Renaissance. Indeed, I would argue that Shakespeare is teaching us that such an education, such a purgation, belongs to the possibility of a free and responsible government, and a lesson we may need to relearn. We too must see providence in the fall of the sparrow, if we are to act so our purposes do not fall upon the inventors’ heads.

Footnotes

  • 1
    R. Crouse, ‘The Authority of the Thirty-Nine Articles Today’ in Richmond Bridge (ed), The Thirty-Nine Articles (St Peter’s Publication, Charlottetown, 1990).
  • 2
    A. McGrath, Luther’s Theology of the Cross Second Edition (Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), pp. 150–153.
  • 3
    G. Pico della Mirandola, Oration on the Dignity of Man in Charles Glenn Wallis, Paul J.W. Miller, and Douglas Carmichael (trans) (Hackett Publishing Co., 1965), pp. 4–5.
  • 4
    The reading offered here is informed by P. Epstein, ‘The Purgation of the Hero in Shakespearean Tragedy,’ Animus 3 (1998), pp. 3–29.
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