by Ted Reilly
Regarding Ghosts & Sin
If the appearance of a King’s ghost is not shock enough, we are reminded that it is that time of year in which ghosts do walk the wintry world, for the play is set in the period leading up to the Holy Season, from Halloween to St. Valentine’s Day. For Shakespeare’s audience, even though they may have been city-folk and supporters of the Tudors’ ecclesiastical Reformation, still believed in the depths of their wintry bones in ghosts and witches, in the physical realities of a paradisiacal Heaven, a cold Purgatory and the raging fires of Hell. The Church may have been reformed financially and politically, but it was still essentially Catholic, and the core doctrines regarding Sin, Punishment and Salvation still held good.
Sin is the English translation of the Latin word peccatum, and is related to other words implying a sense of guilt. Christian doctrine treats Sin in a number of distinct ways. For St. Paul, a self-tortured Manichaean at heart, Sin is the ruling power in the world (Romans 5.12 & Galatians 3.22) and in people (Romans 6.6 & 7.14-22), whereas for St. John, who was far closer in spirit to Christ than any of the other apostles, all Sin is the opposite of Truth, and is related to disbelief in Christ (John 9.41, 15.24). In the anonymous Epistle to the Hebrews, Sin is a disorder to be atoned for by sacrifice (Heb. 2.17 & 5.1). Generally speaking, the word Sin is used rather loosely to mean any transgression against the current moral code, as well as in a specific theological sense, but retains the sense of a misdeed for which one ought feel guilty (Bowker 545).
Greek is a little more precise than English: the term hamartía means not only a mistake or sin in the religious sense, but covers also the general notion of a fatal flaw in the very core of oneself, the soul. This is Hamlet’s burden from which there can be no release. Yet Sin must be atoned for, that is the person must be reconciled with Christ, or else the sinner will be punished. The degree of punishment in the afterlife will depend upon the degree of wrong committed by the sinner as mediated by one’s desire to repent that sin, and to repair the situation. For example, a thief would be enjoined not merely to confess and repent, but also to return the stolen items, an adulterer would be asked to give up his mistress and repair his marriage: only then could the sin be thought of as having been expiated, forgiven by God.
Remember how Claudius attempted to divest himself of his sinful burden, and how Hamlet could not bring himself to avenge his father’s murder at that very moment, lest Claudius escape the full force of justice? Hamlet knew his Christian Doctrine only too well, and being of an anti-Christian temperament, would not have let Claudius’ sins go unpunished.
Lesser wrongs than murder may not inhibit one’s eventual passage to Heaven, but a period of time would be spent in Purgatory, a state imagined to be cold and inhospitable, where one would await eventual release, whilst the unrepentant, or unforgiven, sinner would be cast into the pits of Hell. Christian doctrine is quite specific however in its insistence that Christ’s sacrifice had effected reconciliation between humanity and the Creator, and that in its essence, Christian doctrine is essentially one of hope for human salvation. So that Protestant theology, and its Catholic response after the Council of Trent (1545-1563), marked a climatic change in Christian sensibility, emphasizing more the absolute wretchedness of humanity rather than God’s willingness to forgive Sin, fatally differentiating the western and eastern (Orthodox) churches. One may have had Faith and perhaps even Charity, which virtue Hamlet lacked, but Hope was sorely lacking in Hamlet’s time and person.
For those of the audience who were a little more modern in their thinking, or were secretly atheist, ghosts and goblins were all part of the Old Religion that should be thrown into the junk-heap of History and a new world of Reason be allowed to blossom. But they still thrilled to the spectacle of Old Hamlet putting the wind up the guards and then the son. It was good drama, and ghosts did have precedent in the classical texts. The Renaissance had opened up a Pandora’s box, allowing all the myths and legends from ancient Greece and Rome to take up a new life in the fertile minds of the Italians, and later in all of Europe’s consciousness. Italy revived its memories of ancient glories, every river and glen harboured its nymphs and dryads, hairdos flounced and stays were loosed. Even the gnarly wealds of England were to be populated by Bacchus and Pan, by nubile nymphs and fierce Dianas, who tumbled through summery nights alongside native spirits such as Puck, the Starry Hunt and Robin Hood. The Renaissance eventually struck deep roots in the British psyche, linking with those elements that had been only thinly disguised by Romanization and Christianity. Ted Hughes’ introductory essay to his book on Shakespeare takes us deep into that territory of goblins & ghosts.
Wittenberg & Luther
The more I read about the development of Lutheran doctrine, the more I am attracted to an interpretation that sees the malign influence of Mani (Persia 216 – 276 AD) who developed a new, prophetic religion in opposition to the ancient disposition, which was more or less like that of the Greeks & Hindus. His teachings were fundamentally Gnostic & dualistic, positing an absolute opposition between the Deity & Creation. There was an elaborate and confused cosmological myth leading through previous prophets, Buddha, Zoroaster and Jesus to Mani, and thence to the creation of an elect group of leaders. These teachings spread quite rapidly & taken up by the Albigensians, Calvinists and then to other post-Catholic doctrines such as Marxism-Leninism. St. Augustine of Hippo (354 – 430 AD) was deeply influenced by Manichaeism, and his doctrine of Original Sin is a direct reading of Mani’s gloomy teaching. All in all, we can see how this strain of thought affects the play in three sets of speeches: on the essential nature of this world (‘‘O, that this too, too solid flesh would melt’ I, ii), the two contemplations on Death (‘To be, or not to be …’ III, i. & ‘Alas, Poor Yorick’ V, i.), and in the two quite awful, misogynist statements (‘Frailty, thy name is woman’ (I, 2, 142) & ‘Get thee to a nunnery’ (III, I, 14).
If some summery breezes had wafted into England’s airs from Italy and Greece, then cold northern blasts had announced a contrary influence, that which we call the Reformation. Martin Luther (1483 – 1546) was an overly pious Saxon priest, an Augustinian, a brilliant Professor of scripture at Wittenberg University, and in modern terms, a manic-depressive. His decision to enter the Church as a cleric was allegedly prompted by a near-death experience: hardly a valid reason for entering Holy Orders. He was a strange man, given to morose paranoia, possibly admirable in some respects, und echt Deutsch. Luther’s Reformation and its aftermath was indeed a period of misery, physical, political and moral. Which, if Hughes was correct about Shakespeare’s shamanist powers, may in part explain the general gloominess of this play.
Hamlet is usually dressed in black. We have tended to take this a sign of mourning for his father. But it can also be read as the uniform of a scholar. He had just hurried back from his studies at the University of Wittenberg, where Luther had taught well within living memory. One would imagine that Hamlet, as Prince and putative heir to the throne of Denmark, to have been pursuing further studies in Law, and realpolitik, with Horatio and tutors from Wittenberg close by.
How he would have applied this learning to the task of ruling a state under considerable stress is a matter on which one can only speculate. In his 1996 production of Hamlet, K Branagh dressed his hero in royal red, perhaps to indicate the anticipation that he would have succeeded to the Throne, or was likely to take up Claudius’ offer of participation in the country’s governance. And one can imagine this not-so-young man taking up the burdens and responsibilities of office. But no, for he is bound, like Luther, by an overwhelming sense of personal guilt and moral irresolution: his Christian training would have led him towards accommodation and forgiveness, but the far deeper, that northern barbarian Grundriß of his psyche, points to vengeance as bloody as his vestments. When he does decide to act, it is in a manner that he is thought to have lost his mind.
Hamlet as Lord of Misrule
Roth (2002) makes the proposition is made that this play has been deliberately constructed around the winter-season calendar, interpreting Hamlet as the Christmas Prince & a representative of a culture far older than the modernizing Elizabethan state, as such, he a threat to the new order. His apparent madness can be read as a manifestation of the deepening conflict between what Hughes terms the Old Religion, that is Pre-Trent Catholicism, & the New Religion, manifest in the urban phenomenon of Protestantism. Certainly, a cursory reading of Elizabethan statutes concerning the governance of the rural population reveals a distrust of popular culture and folk belief. Rather than accept the organic, life-affirming weltanschauung offered by life outside of London’s stews, the upstart literati, lawyers and laymen who would be theologians, rejected and constrained the vital impulse, erected a fierce Jehovah, who is in effect Moloch of the Carthaginians, and sacrificed their children to it in England’s bloody Civil War. Hamlet revolts against such constraints, lets loose the players and pricks the King’s conscience.
But Hamlet as drama goes deeper than merely allowing for licentiousness, Hamlet had clearly taken Ophelia as his mistress, and mere misrule, the chaos that must have followed after the King’s reaction to the players’ presentation. It is a dramatisation of the ritual slaying of a failed monarch, as demanded and practised in the Old Religion. Traces of such rituals have been found throughout northern Europe. Seamus Heaney has enthralled us with his responses to this practice, and to parallel events in mid-C20 Ulster, in ‘The Tollund Man’ and ‘Punishment’. One recent discovery is the Lindow Man (d. C1AD), whose body was discovered in a bog near Manchester in 1984. He had been ritually slain: three sharp blows to the head, the jugular vein pierced as he was garrotted, then cast face-down into the bog. The clue that led archaeologists Ross & Robson (1989) to view this as a ritual, religious, sacrifice of a princely figure was the discovery of mistletoe in the victim’s stomach. Mistletoe, if ingested, causes convulsions, it’s a poison, such as Claudius had prepared for his nephew. Hamlet was to be a sacrificial victim like the Lindow Man.
Claudius acted out of fear & the need to preserve his rotten estate, whereas Hamlet is the representative of the Goddess of Vengeance, Skaði: it’s interesting to note that she is often conflated with Nerthus, the Goddess of Fertility, but it does make sense that fertility thwarted, as by Ophelia’s madness and apparent suicide, would incite a divine impulse towards rectification of affairs. In his fury Hamlet matches his Germanic precursors, Siegfried (Old Norse, Sigurðr) and Beowulf. The first hero was a dragon-slayer, the second saved Denmark from a half-human submarine monster, both eventually died for their pains: it seems that they both stem from the same model of heroic youth found in tales such as diverse the Finnish Väinämöinen, Latvian Lačplesis, Rome’s Romulus & the Hindu Arjuna. There is even a Celtic precursor for hamlet in, Kernunnos, the hornèd deity, who is depicted on the Gundestrup Bowl (C1 AD), both fecund and male regnant, and associated with rituals of slaughter and regeneration as was the great hero or the Táin Bo Cuailgne, Cuchulláin.
This is all to say that Hamlet has been positioned by Shakespeare as a non-Christian hero. He lacks the cardinal virtue of Charity, in that he stays from slaying Claudius at prayer, he cannot forgive his mother and causes her hurt despite his father’s injunction, and cannot accept Ophelia’s love at a time when both he and she are in sore need of love, both physical and spiritual. Whatever Faith he may have had, conventional or real, has been replaced by his terror at the sight of his father’s tortured ghost and realizing that the portals of Hell gape as widely for him as they do for Claudius, so that all Hope has fled with his father at cock-crow. Hence Christ’s gospel of love and compassion fall on deaf ears, for Hamlet has killed his soul in order to become an instrument of vengeance.
Moreover, Hamlet is clearly an anti-Lutheran figure. Justification by Faith is not a course to be followed by him, nor is there any consideration for the State’s stability and the construct of the new bourgeois order, as desired by Luther and his disciples. Rather, chaos and darkness are Hamlet’s goals, he would plunge Denmark’s court into a bloodbath. If Hamlet had come to rule over Denmark in the early C16, with Horatio as his Chancellor, he would have had to deal with any remnants of Polonius’ clan and with the still-lurking Fortinbras: any hope that he could have become a successful philosopher King would have been dashed by the struggle between the Lutheranised burghers and the still-Catholic rural sector, and intervention by foreign forces. Hamlet would have been no different in dealing with any troublesome forces than the Danish King Christian III, who himself was just as blood-thirsty as Beowulf, slaughtering 2000 Catholic rebels in Aalborg in December 1534. The Goddess of Complete Being, to use Hughes’ term, would have then taken form as flocks of ravens, the sign of Morrigan, and Denmark would have become a wasteland as the Norse and Polish armies clashed in wintry darkness, letting Fortinbras take the pickings.
And we are not yet done with the process of renewal of critical approaches and the rewriting of History, both global and Shakespearean. The Australian feminist critic, Germaine Greer has explored the dramatist’s life through the agency of his wife, Anne Hathaway, making him a far more humane and approachable figure, Bloom sees Shakespeare as the inventor of modern Humanism, whilst the formidable Slovenian philosopher & critic, Slavoj Žižek, re-reads Hamlet through the twin prisms of Marx and Lacan. Where we can go with these insights, as teachers, is a matter for careful consideration. The text must be re-read intently and the characters allowed speak their parts, but the enrichment of our various interpretations will come from our life experiences and our wider reading.
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Bibliography
Texts:
Bloom H. (1998). Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, NY, Riverhead/Penguin.
Branagh K. (1996). Hamlet, Culver City, Colombia Pictures.
Bowker J. (2005). The Concise Oxford Dictionary of World Religions, Oxon. OUP.
Davies N. (1996). Europe: A History, Oxon. OUP.
Greer G. (2008). Shakespeare’s Wife, NY, Harper.
Heaney S. (1990). New Selected Poems 1966 -1987, London, Faber & Faber.
Hughes T. (1992). Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being, London, Faber & Faber.
Kott J. (1994). Shakespeare our Contemporary, tr. B. Taborski, NY, Norton.
Kubilius, J. (1979). A Short History of Vilnius University, Vilnius, Mokslas.
Milosz C. (1962). The Captive Mind, tr. J. Zielonko, London, Mercury.
Ross A. & Robins D. (1989). The Life and Death of a Druid Prince, by Anne Ross and Don Robins, NY, Simon & Schuster.
Wilson Knight G. (2001). The Wheel of Fire, NY, Roultedge.
Žižek S. (1989). The Sublime Object of Ideology, NY, Verso.
Websites:
Gray TA, 2008, Criticism, Palomar University: http://shakespeare.palomar.edu/criticism.htm
Heaney S, ‘The Tollund Man’, YouTube: http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDT2ZdNL9CM
Rosenberg S. (1997). Something’s Misbegotten in the State of Denmark, Salon.
http://www.salon.com/jan97/hamlet970120.html
Roth S. (2002) Hamlet as The Christmas Prince: Certain Speculations on Hamlet, the Calendar, Revels, and Misrule, Early Modern Literary Studies 7.3:
http://extra.shu.ac.uk/emls/emlsjour.html
Productions of Hamlet:
- Nekrošius, Hamletas | Pilnas Spektaklis, 2020.