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- Atchley,
Clinton P. E. “Reconsidering the Ghost in Hamlet: Cohesion or
Coercion?” The Philological Review 28.2 (Fall 2002): 5-20.
- Fendt, Gene. Is Hamlet
a Religious Drama? An Essay on a Question in Kierkegaard.
Marquette Studies in Philosophy 21. Milwaukee: Marquette UP, 1999.
- Fienberg, Nona. "Jephthah's
Daughter: The Parts Ophelia Plays." Old Testament Women
in Western Literature. Ed. Raymond-Jean Frontain and Jan Wojcit.
Conway: UCA, 1991. 128-43.
- Greenblatt, Stephen. “The
Mousetrap.” Shakespeare Studies 35 (1997): 1-32.
[Reprinted in Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt’s
Practicing New Historicism (2000).]
- Greenblatt, Stephen. “Remember
Me.” Hamlet in Purgatory. By Greenblatt. Princeton:
Princeton UP, 2001. 205-57.
- Hassel, R. Chris, Jr. “Hamlet’s
‘Too, too solid flesh.'” Sixteenth Century Journal
25 (1994): 609-22.
- Hassel, R. Chris, Jr. How
infinite in faculties: Hamlets Confusion of God and
Man. Literature and Theology 8 (1994): 127-39.
- Hassel, R. Chris, Jr. “Painted
Women: Annunciation Motifs in Hamlet.” Comparative
Drama 32 (1998): 47-84.
- Hassel, R. Chris, Jr. “Wormwood,
Wormwood.” Deutsche Shakespeare—Gesellschaft
West: Jahrbuch [no vol. #] (1993): 150-62.
- Landau, Aaron. “‘Let
me not burst in ignorance’: Skepticism and Anxiety in Hamlet.”
English Studies 82.3 (June 2001): 218-30.
- Low, Anthony. “Hamlet
and the Ghost of Purgatory: Intimations of Killing the Father.”
English Literary Renaissance 29.3 (Autumn 1999): 443-67.
- Mallette, Richard. From
Gyves to Graces: Hamlet and Free Will. Journal
of English and German Philology 93 (1994): 336-55.
- Matheson, Mark. “Hamlet
and ‘A matter tender and dangerous.” Shakespeare
Quarterly 46
(Winter 1995): 383-97.
- Milne, Joseph. “Hamlet:
The Conflict Between Fate and Grace.” Hamlet Studies
18.1-2 (Summer/Winter 1996): 29-48.
- Ozawa, Hiroshi. “‘I
must be cruel only to be kind’: Apocalyptic Repercussions
in Hamlet.” Hamlet and Japan. Ed. Yoshiko
Uéno. Hamlet Collection 2. New York: AMS, 1995.
73-85.
- Shafer, Ronald G. “Hamlet:
Christian or Humanist?” Studies in the Humanities
17 (1991): 21-35.
- Tiffany, Grace. “Anti-Theatricalism
and Revolutionary Desire in Hamlet (Or, the Play Without
the Play).” Upstart Crow 15 (1995): 61-74.

Atchley,
Clinton P. E. “Reconsidering the Ghost in Hamlet: Cohesion or
Coercion?” The Philological Review 28.2 (Fall 2002): 5-20.
GHOST / HAMLET / HISTORY OF IDEAS /
THEOLOGICAL
This essay
focuses “on some puzzling aspects of the Ghost’s nature and look[s] at
some possibilities of what the Ghost may mean and how it functions in
the play” (5). The “religious atmosphere in Elizabethan England and
how this may have affected Shakespeare’s audience” (5) are considered,
particularly the differing Catholic and Protestant “beliefs concerning
ghosts and the supernatural” (8). Instead of defining “the true nature
of ghosts for his audiences,” Shakespeare “incorporates within his
play both Catholic and Protestant views of the Ghost and also presents
a third perspective on the Ghost, one steeped in folkloric tradition”
(10). He “expects his audience to perceive the Ghost for what it is, a
diabolical manifestation on a mission to trick Hamlet into forfeiting
his soul” (12); the play’s devastating/destructive conclusion
“supports this interpretation” (12). In “exhorting Hamlet to commit
murder through an act of revenge, the Ghost plays most foully for
Hamlet’s soul” (14). The counter argument is that “the Ghost tells the
truth surrounding the circumstances of old Hamlet’s death,” as
corroborated by Claudius’ private “confession of guilt”; but “a devil
is capable of telling the truth if it enables him to achieve his goal”
(14). The question then becomes, once the Ghost has accomplished his
goal by motivating Hamlet to commit revenge (and, hence, to loose his
soul), why does it appear later in the closet scene and in its
nightgown? The answer is to perform two functions (14): first, to
prevent Hamlet’s convincing of Gertrude to repent; the Ghost’s
appearing only to Hamlet “intensifies Hamlet’s apparent madness such
that Gertrude attributes Hamlet’s accusations to his insanity. Her
moment of grace has passed” (16). Second, by appearing in the wife’s
bed chamber, wearing a nightgown, the Ghost “ reactivates the domestic
values that Hamlet keenly feels he has lost” (17), and evokes
cherished familial memories in Hamlet (18). “The ‘piteous action’ that
the Ghost makes is directed [. . .] at Hamlet, to wring his emotions
and drive him to distraction to make Gertrude think him mad. And it
succeeds” (18).
Fendt, Gene. Is Hamlet
a Religious Drama? An Essay on a Question in Kierkegaard. Marquette
Studies in Philosophy 21. Milwaukee: Marquette UP, 1999.
HAMLET / MARXISM / METAPHYSICS / THEOLOGICAL
This monograph begins by surveying the different definitions
of religious drama. Chapters two and three discuss the "scholarly
cruxes" of Hamlet (e.g., Hamlet's delay) and evokes
Aristotle and Aquinas to assist in comprehending "what a religious
understanding of Hamlet might be" (16). Chapters four and five
explore the contrast between Hamlet and Kierkegaard's and
Taciturnus' writings on religious art, "examine the metaphysical
and philosophical presuppositions of the ordinary understanding of
religious drama as representations bearing on dogmatic truths,"
and "show how Kierkegaard's indirect communication seeks to avoid
that philosophical problematic" (16). The last chapter uses Bataille's
theories of religious economies to argue Hamlet's status
as a religious drama.

Fienberg, Nona. "Jephthah's
Daughter: The Parts Ophelia Plays." Old Testament Women
in Western Literature. Ed. Raymond-Jean Frontain and Jan Wojcit.
Conway: UCA, 1991. 128-43.
FEMINISM / GERTRUDE / NEW HISTORICISM / OPHELIA /
THEOLOGICAL
This essay explores "cultural resonances between
the politically unstable time of Judges in Israel's history, the
political confusion in Hamlet's Denmark, and the anxiety
over succession in late-Elizabethan England" (133). While Jephthah's
daughter and Ophelia share similarities, they also differ in an
important way: the unnamed daughter is an obedient sacrifice, and
Ophelia "develops from her status as a victim" to "an
author of a potentially different story, a woman's story" (133-34).
Ophelia comes to realize her subversive potential and, in a commanding
oration about the weakening of Hamlet's "noble mind,"
laments the lose of her own political ambitions (135). But her madness
empowers her with liberties, such as demanding a meeting with Gertrude.
Once granted entrance, "she, like a wandering player, comes
to hold a mirror up to the court" (136). Gone is her submissive
voice, replaced by "a range of voices" (137). Ophelia
now "commands attention" (137). Interestingly, her invasion
of the court parallels Laertes' rebellious entrance: they have "competing
political claims, his assertive and explicit, hers subversive and
encoded in mad woman's language" (137). Because her songs "introduce
the protesting voice of oppressed women in society" through
the veils of a ballad culture, Ophelia is not understood by her
male audience; but her "rebellion against the double standard
and its oppression of women arouses fear in Gertrude, who understands"
(138). When the Queen reports Ophelia's drowning, she insists "on
her time and the attention of the plotting men" (138). Her
description portrays "a woman who draws her understanding of
her world from women's culture" (139). The Queen, "perhaps
like Jephthah's daughter's maiden friends, returned from temporary
exile to interpret the meaning of the sacrificed daughter's life"
(140).

Greenblatt, Stephen. “The
Mousetrap.” Shakespeare Studies 35 (1997): 1-32.
[Reprinted in
Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt’s Practicing
New Historicism (2000).]
NEW HISTORICISM / THEOLOGICAL
This article begins by exploring the observation
that “most of the significant and sustained thinking in
the early modern period about the nature of linguistic signs
centered on or was deeply influenced by Eucharistic controversies”
(8), such as theatricality, idolatry, and vulnerability of matter.
This article then proposes “that the literature of the
period was written in the shadow of these controversies”
and “that apparently secularly works are charged with
the language of Eucharistic anxiety” (20). In Hamlet,
the protagonist reports that the dead Polonius may be found
at supper: “the supper where the host does not eat but
is eaten is the supper of the Lord” (21). He also comments
on worms, an “allusion to the Diet of Worms where Luther’s
doctrines were officially condemned by the Holy Roman Emperor”
(21). The allusion functions “to echo and reinforce the
theological and, specifically, the Eucharistic subtext”
(21). Hamlet explains his meaning as “Nothing but to show
you how a king may / go a progress through the guts of a beggar”
(4.3.30-31). While “half-buried here is a death threat
against the usurper-king,” “the rage in Hamlet’s
words reaches beyond his immediate enemy to touch his father’s
body, rotting in the grave” (21). The father charges Hamlet
to revenge his murder, but “the task becomes mired in
the flesh that will not melt away, that cannot free itself from
longings for mother and lover” (23). “And the task
is further complicated by the father’s own entanglements
in the flesh” because he died with sins on his head (23).
Furthermore, “the communion of ghostly father and carnal
son is more complex, troubled not only by the son’s madness
and suicidal despair but by the persistent, ineradicable materialism
figured in the progress of a king through the guts of a beggar”
(25). In the graveyard scene, “when Hamlet follows the
noble dust of Alexander until he finds it stopping a bung-hole,
he does not go on to meditate on the immortality of Alexander’s
incorporeal name or spirit. The progress he sketches is the
progress of a world that is all matter” (26). The significance
of the Eucharistic controversies “for English literature
in particular lies less in the problem of the sign than in .
. . the problem of the leftover, that is, the status
of the material reminder” (8).
[ top
]
Greenblatt, Stephen. “Remember
Me.” Hamlet in Purgatory. By Greenblatt. Princeton:
Princeton
UP, 2001. 205-57.
GHOST / NEW HISTORICISM / PERFORMANCE / THEOLOGICAL
While continuing the monograph’s historical
exploration of “the afterlife of Purgatory” and
of remembrance of the dead in England (3), this chapter begins
by examining Hamlet’s “shift of spectral
obligation from vengeance to remembrance” (207) and by
analyzing how Shakespeare “weirdly and unexpectedly conjoins
memory as haunting with its opposite, the fading of remembrance”
(218). It then approaches the core argument of the monograph:
“the psychological in Shakespeare’s tragedy is constructed
almost entirely out of the theological, and specifically out
of the issue of remembrance that . . . lay at the heart of the
crucial early-sixteenth-century debate about Purgatory”
(229). Although “the Church of England had explicitly
rejected the Roman Catholic conception of Purgatory and the
practices that had been developed around it” in 1563 (235),
the Elizabethan theater circumvented the resulting censorship
by representing Purgatory “as a sly jest, a confidence
trick, a mistake . . . But it could not be represented as a
frightening reality. Hamlet comes closer to doing so
than any other play of this period” (236). Through “a
network of allusions” to Purgatory (e.g., “for a
certain term” [1.5.10], “burned and purged”
[1.5.13], “Yes, by Saint Patrick” [1.5.136], “hic
et ubique” [1.5.156]), as well as Hamlet’s
attention to (and brooding upon) the Ghost’s residence/source
(236-37), the play presents a frightening-yet-absolving alternative
to Hell. The play also seems “a deliberate forcing together
of radically incompatible accounts of almost everything that
matters in Hamlet,” such as Catholic versus Protestant
tenets regarding the body and rituals (240). The prevalent distribution
of printed religious arguments heightens the possibility that
“these works are sources for Shakespeare’s play”:
“they stage an ontological argument about spectrality
and remembrance, a momentous public debate, that unsettled the
institutional moorings of a crucial body of imaginative materials
and therefore made them available for theatrical appropriation”
(249). For example, Foxe’s comedic derision of More’s
theological stance “helped make Shakespeare’s tragedy
possible. It did so by participating in a violent ideological
struggle that turned negotiations with the dead from an institutional
process governed by the church to a poetic process governed
by guilt, projection, and imagination” (252). “The
Protestant attack on ‘the middle state of souls’
. . . did not destroy the longings and fears that Catholic doctrine
had focused and exploited”; instead, “the space
of Purgatory becomes the space of the stage where old Hamlet’s
Ghost is doomed for a certain term to walk the night”
(256-57).

Hassel, R. Chris,
Jr. “Hamlet’s ‘Too, too solid flesh.'”
Sixteenth Century Journal 25 (1994): 609-
22.
HAMLET / THEOLOGICAL
This article suggests “that while Hamlet
pays lip service to Luther’s doctrine of salvation
by grace rather than merit, he insists in complete contradiction
to that doctrine on doing and knowing perfectly” (612).
A symptom of Hamlet’s “enslaving prudence of
the flesh” is his fear of death, as his excessive
mourning for his dead father demonstrates; another symptom
is his fear of judgement, which his first encounter with
the Ghost manifests (612). In “rejecting the traditional
Christian scheme of fall and redemption,” Hamlet is
also “uneasy with human imperfection” (614).
He mistakenly idealizes reason, wrongly values “‘external
goods’ of family and honor” (616), and egotistically
focuses on himself, primarily in his “self-indulgent
use of another person” (e.g., Ophelia, Gertrude) (617).
Fortunately, “something mysterious happens to Hamlet
after his rough-hewn encounters on the ships and in the
graveyard” (619). In reconciling “himself to
a new reality which dismisses his mind, his thinking, his
judgement, in favor of the inscrutable will of God,”
Hamlet briefly rises “towards the top of Luther’s
stern ladder of imperfection” (621). But Hamlet is
not completely cured, persistently idolizing “perfect
knowing and perfect doing” (622). In the final scene,
the “conflict of flesh and spirit persists through
Hamlet’s last words and deeds” but ceases “by
grace and by death” (622).
Hassel, R. Chris, Jr. How infinite
in faculties: Hamlets Confusion of God and Man. Literature
and Theology 8 (1994): 127-39.
HAMLET / THEOLOGICAL
Aside from debunking R. M. Fryes reading of Hamlet,
this article argues that Hamlet is frustrated throughout most
of the play precisely because he does not balance thought and action,
or understand the proper relationship between his faculties of memory,
reason, and will and those of his maker (127). Hamlets comment:
Sure he that made us with such large discourse,
Looking before and after, gave us not
That capability and godlike reason
To fust in us unused. (4.4.36-39)
marks his confusion about his own moral faculties of reason and
memory and their role in the relationship between God the maker and
man the made (128). Donne, Andrews, Luther, and Calvin describe
the creation of man as a discourse among the Holy Trinity, but because
Hamlet holds himself up as author and finisher of his own salvation,
not God, not Christ, he will remain outside the discourse of faith
(131). Rather than heed Donnes sermon on the subject, he also
mistakenly assumes that his understanding, will, and memory do not require
grace. Hamlet complains about the malfunctioning of his moral faculties
and criticizes the place of original sin in Gods providential
plan (135). He does not comprehend that these natural faculties
can only be serviceable to God, as Donne cautions (134);
nor does his self-absorption allow him to appreciate fully
the traditional competing vision of faith in providence,
which is the paradox of our remembering both where we have come
[creation] and where we are going [redemption] (136). The accidental
killing of Polonius allows Hamlet a glimpse of his personal imperfection
and initiates the concession that grace is needed (134). Hamlet returns
from sea trusting providence, seeming to have escaped at last
from the augury of his mind (137). This essay concludes
by studying the conflicting religious implications of Hamlets
last spoken words to show that closure is out of the question,
whether our visions are Christian or otherwise (138).

Hassel, R. Chris, Jr. “Painted
Women: Annunciation Motifs in Hamlet.” Comparative
Drama 32 (1998): 47-84.
ART / HAMLET / NEW HISTORICISM / OPHELIA / THEOLOGICAL
After exploring the representations of Annunciation
in art and religion, this essay argues “that Hamlet’s
parodies and distortions of a rich array of traditional Annunciation
motifs are set ironically but not didactically against his tendency
to trust his own reason and to assert his own will against the inscrutable
will of God” (58). The nunnery scene, with Ophelia manipulated
into the posturing of a pseudo Mary, merits intense focus. For example,
the curtains that Claudius and Polonius hide behind are, by the
late sixteenth century, “quite commonly a part of Annunciation
iconography” (63). Such “distorted and parodied Annunciation
motifs inform the impossible miracles that Hamlet demands of Ophelia
and Gertrude, his maid and his mother,” as only Mary can fulfill
both roles chastely (67). While evidence in the text suggests Ophelia’s
virginity, the maid is “only a poor imitation of the thing
itself,” of Mary (73): she is “a victim rather than
a hero,” “used, manipulated, betrayed” (72). Hamlet
too is unlike Mary due to “his distrust of God’s Providence”
(73) and his rejection of “the traditional Christian scheme
of fall and redemption” (74). Although Hamlet “is never
painted simply in Mary’s image” (76), he “is moving
at the end of the play, inexorably if also inconsistently, towards
letting be, ‘rest’ in a ‘silence,’ a wisdom,
of Marian humility” (77).
[ top ]

Hassel, R. Chris, Jr. “Wormwood,
Wormwood.” Deutsche Shakespeare—Gesellschaft West:
Jahrbuch [no vol. #] (1993): 150-62.
CLAUDIUS / GERTRUDE / HAMLET / THEOLOGICAL
This study comments on Hamlet’s reference
to “Wormwood, Wormwood” in The Mousetrap
scene (3.2.173) with the belief that “Herbal, literary and
theological uses provide unexpectedly suggestive contexts for
expanding our sense of Hamlet, Gertrude and Claudius within this
highly charged dramatic moment, and in the larger play”
(150). Theological connotations of the word suggest, among other
things, mortification, meaning that Hamlet’s words “refer
to the salutary contrition and confession Hamlet expects the Player-Queen’s
words to induce in his mother” (151). Persistently lacking
contrition in the closet scene, Gertrude receives a continued,
intensified dose of “wormwood,” administered by Hamlet
(152). Also relevant to Gertrude, wormwood is biblically associated
with harlotry and punishment/judgement (153). In Romeo and
Juliet, wormwood is described as “the bitter herb used
in weaning a child from his mother’s breast” (154);
hence, the implication in Hamlet is that the mother/son
relationship alters. The herb was also used as a purgative medicine
(156), an antidote (159), an air freshener (160), and a “deterrent
to mice and rats” (160). All of these possibilities develop
linguistic references, themes, and motifs in the play. For example,
the last suggests that Hamlet’s wormwood “might at
once expel the mouse-like lust in his too-lascivious mother and
deter the object of her lust, the devilish, mouse-like king Claudius,
thus killing two mice with one trap (161). Perhaps no audience
member could hold all of “these theological and pharmaceutical
associations in a kaleidoscopic response to one allusion,”
but the theatrical experience improves in relation to the degree
of knowledge (161-62). And “this learning impresses us with
the unfathomable complexity of Hamlet’s mind and his heart”
(162).
[ top ]
Landau, Aaron. “‘Let
me not burst in ignorance’: Skepticism and Anxiety in Hamlet.”
English
Studies 82.3 (June 2001): 218-30.
GHOST / HAMLET / HISTORY OF IDEAS / NEW HISTORICISM
/ PHILOSOPHICAL / THEOLOGICAL
This essay proposes that, by considering Hamlet
“within the context of the Reformation and the concurrent
skeptical crisis, the distinctly epistemological making of Hamlet’s
ineffectuality takes on an intriguing historical dimension: it suggests
the utter ineffectuality of human knowledge as this ineffectuality
was advocated by contemporary skeptics” (218). The opening
scene presents “the debacle of human knowledge” (219),
the “mixed, inconsistent, confused, and tentative versions
of human understanding” through the “uselessness”
of Horatio’s learning to communicate with the Ghost and the
in-conclusiveness of Bernardo’s “Christian narrative”
to explain the spirit (220). This “contradistinction with
standard versions of early modern skepticism, which vindicate and
embrace human ignorance as against the violent pressures of early
modern religious dogmatism,” suggests Shakespeare “to
be anxious about uncertainty and its discontents in a way that Greek
and humanist skeptics never are” (220). Hamlet’s direct
echoing “of contemporary thinkers as diverse as Montaigne
and Bruno only strengthens the impression that the play, far from
representing a systematic or even coherent line of thought, virtually
subsumes the intellectual confusion of the age” (221). “The
ghost functions as the very emblem of such confusion” (221),
withholding “the type of knowledge most crucial to early modern
minds: religious knowledge” (220). The “very issues
that are associated, in the Gospels, with the defeat of skeptical
anxiety, had become, during the Reformation, axes of debate, rekindling
skeptical anxiety rather than abating it” (223). In this context,
the Ghost appears “as an implicit, or inverted, revelation”
(222), “a grotesque, parodic version of Christ resurrected”
(223): instead of “elevating Hamlet to a truly novel and unprecedented
level of knowledge” (224), the Ghost “leaves Hamlet
with nothing but ignorance” (222). Hamlet claims to believe
the Ghost after The Mousetrap, but his ensuing “blunders”
“debunk the sense of certainty that he pretends to have established”
(227). The problem seems the “inescapably political”
world of Denmark, where “errors, partial judgements, and theological
(mis)conceptions are never only academic, they cost people their
lives and cannot, therefore, be dismissed as unavoidable and innocuous
imperfections or indifferent trifles,” as Montaigne and Pyrrhonist
believe (228).

Low, Anthony. “Hamlet
and the Ghost of Purgatory: Intimations of Killing the Father.”
English Literary Renaissance 29.3 (Autumn 1999): 443-67.
GHOST / HAMLET / NEW HISTORICISM / THEOLOGICAL
This article contends that “Buried deeply
in Hamlet, in the relationship between the prince and
his father, is a source tale, an unspoken acknowledgement that
the modernist project of achieving complete autonomy from the
past rested . . . on the denial and forgetting of Purgatory”
(446). During “the eve of the Reformation,” the
English people—of all classes—were interested in
Purgatory because of “concern for their souls and those
of their ancestors, together with a strong sense of communal
solidarity between the living and the dead” (447). But
the reformation put an end to the belief and its practices.
As inheritances of material goods replaced inheritances of the
moral and “legal obligation” to pray for the dead
(and hence to remember past/origin) (451), “focus turned
from community and solidarity, with the dead and the poor, toward
self-concern and individual self-sufficiency” (466). In
Hamlet, the Ghost implies “that he, King Hamlet,
was Catholic” (453) and that he has returned from Purgatory
because of Claudius’ worst crime: “callousness to
a brother’s eternal fate” (454). “Notably,
when Hamlet’s father asks his son to ‘remember’
him, he asks for something more than vengeance, but couches
his request in terms less explicit than to ask him to lighten
his burdens through prayer” (458). Shakespeare’s
caution with “his mostly Protestant audience” seems
the obvious explanation for this subtlety, but the Ghost’s
stage audience suggests another possibility: “throughout
the play it appears that Hamlet and his friends, as members
of the younger generation, simply are not prepared to hear such
a request” (458). “Nowhere in the play does anyone
mention Purgatory or pray for the dead” (459), and Shakespeare
“leaves the present state of religion in Denmark ambiguous”
(461). Hamlet initially appears as the only person mourning
Old Hamlet, but the son “does not really remember why
or how he should remember his father”; “he
has forgotten the old way to pray for the dead” (463).
When he is accused “of unusual excess in his grief,”
Hamlet “cannot grapple with the theological questions
implied. Instead, he is driven inward, into the most famous
of all early-modern gestures of radical individualist subjectivity:
‘But I have that within which passes show, / These but
the trappings and the suits of woe’ (1.2.85-86)”
(463). Hamlet’s “plangent words reveal . . . that
his deepest concern is not only for his lost father but for
himself and for his innermost identity” (463). The son
“does not forget his father, he remembers him—insofar
as he is capable” (465). But Hamlet’s “ironic
legacy” is to complete, “by driving further inward,
that earlier self-regarding assertion of progressive, autonomous
individualism by his predecessors, who in a moment struck out
ruthlessly against the communal past and against the generous
benefactions and the crying needs of the dead" (467).
[ top ]

Mallette, Richard. From
Gyves to Graces: Hamlet and Free Will. Journal
of English and German Philology 93 (1994): 336-55.
HAMLET / NEW HISTORICISM / THEOLOGICAL
This essay places Hamlet in the context
of sixteenth-century Protestant controversies regarding fate
and free will in order to suggest how, in the last act,
Hamlet transcends Reformation discourse even while incorporating
their understandings of human freedom (338). Although
the Calvinist view of human will held that sin was innate and
unavoidable, a moderate Protestant undercurrent
promoted a capability to choose correct action. Both views appear,
and at times conflict, within the play, as Hamlet appears to
develop an understanding of human potency. Initially he bemoans
his sense of spiritual imprisonment (even though he voluntarily
submits, for example, to the Ghosts wish for revenge).
The killing of Polonius seems the first commitment to action
and suggests Hamlets growing awareness of freedom. Rather
than the sudden ideological shift frequently claimed, Hamlets
return from the sea voyage marks the continuation of an evolving
sense of will. He ultimately achieves spiritual understanding
of fate and free willtheir sharing in mutual and cooperative
interaction (350). But Calvinist tenets have not been eradicated
from the play: Hamlets salvation remains in question,
and human wickedness increases during the plots
final stages of progression (351). Judgement beyond the grave
remains undetermined by the play; instead, Hamlet fixates on
a reckoning to death itself (353). In the end, Hamlets
embrace of the mystery of his mortality has mysteriously liberated
his will (354-55).
[ top ]

Matheson, Mark. “Hamlet
and ‘A matter tender and dangerous.” Shakespeare
Quarterly 46
(Winter 1995): 383-97.
HAMLET / NEW HISTORICISM / PHILOSOPHICAL / THEOLOGICAL
This essay asserts that a consideration of Stoicism
“within a religious context illuminates Hamlet’s
involvement with comprehensive ideological systems and helps
to prepare the way for an analysis of his subjective transformation
at the end of the play” (383). Hamlet’s “awkwardness
in the filial role is symptomatic of his ambivalent relationship
to the ideological order represented by his father, a culture
whose values he consciously embraces but whose established cultural
roles he is unable to perform” (e.g., revenger, obedient
son, devout Catholic) (385). Unfortunately, Stoicism does not
appear as a viable “ideological alternative” for
Hamlet (387). Its discourse “proves useless to him as
a way of ordering his mind or of assisting him in carrying out
the will of his father” (388). The contradictions between
Hamlet’s advice to the players and his behavior during
The Mousetrap “confirm that in the world of the
play the ideologies of Stoicism and humanism are failing”
(389). Caught “in the throes of an ideological unhousing
from both the residual and dominant cultural systems of Danish
society,” Hamlet cannot find “a secure identity
or an ideological basis for action” in either “the
feudal Catholic world nor the humanist Renaissance court”
(389). Through an examination of “early modern ideology,”
this essay argues “that the impasse in which Hamlet finds
himself is broken in the final act by the emergence of a specifically
Protestant discourse of conscience and of God’s predestinating
will” (390). Evidence suggests that “the history
of Protestantism functions as a kind of subtext in Hamlet”
(391). For example, Hamlet’s discussion on “a special
providence in the fall of a sparrow” (5.2.165-68) seems
a “moment in the play when the radical Protestant subtext
surfaces quite clearly” (394). “That predestination
and its worldly consequences were tender political matters may
be an important reason for Shakespeare’s rather oblique
and suggestive handling of Hamlet’s transformation”
(397).
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Milne, Joseph. “Hamlet:
The Conflict Between Fate and Grace.” Hamlet Studies
18.1-2
(Summer/Winter 1996): 29-48.
HAMLET / THEOLOGICAL
This article proposes “that Hamlet did have
the choice to submit to Fate or not and that the option of regenerative
Grace was open to him but that he rejected it” (32). “Shakespeare
is concerned with ultimate choices, life or death choices, and these
are dramatically framed within the Christian Platonism of the Renaissance”:
the election of grace/heaven brings “the power of love and
of regenerative mercy,” while the selection of fate/hell brings
sin, chaos, destruction, and a reversed order of nature (31). In
the play’s first act, Hamlet “is at the crossroads of
a higher or a lower state of being. These two states are represented
by the demands of the Ghost on the one hand, and those of Ophelia
on the other”; the first “demands death,” and
the latter “demands new life” (37-38). Unfortunately,
Hamlet rejects Ophelia and the “Absolute Beauty” that
she represents, marking “a decisive change in his state of
being” (38). The “consequence is a negation
of the power of Grace and a reversal of the unitive power
of Love” (41). For example, Claudius possesses the possibility
of redemption (particularly in his post-Mousetrap attempts
with prayer), but Hamlet’s thirst for revenge—“not
mercy, not even justice”—causes the Prince to miss a
golden opportunity in the prayer scene (43). Instead, of redeeming
or even slaying Claudius, Hamlet goes to his mother’s closet
and kills Polonius. “With this deed the first steps of Claudius
upon the path of salvation are halted and reversed,” as they
are also for Laertes (44). Polonius’ son now “mirrors
Hamlet’s original situation exactly” (45). In the final
scene, Hamlet apologizes to Laertes by drawing distinctions between
himself and his deeds—a merciful separation that he could
not make with Claudius and his father’s murder. “Had
Hamlet applied this transformative principle to Claudius, then the
play would not have been a tragedy” (46). But it is. “The
play ends with the natural order reversed, with vengeance lord where
Grace should rule, death where life should be” (47).
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Ozawa, Hiroshi. “‘I must
be cruel only to be kind’: Apocalyptic Repercussions in Hamlet.”
Hamlet and Japan. Ed. Yoshiko Uéno. Hamlet
Collection 2. New York: AMS, 1995. 73-85.
CLAUDIUS / GHOST / HAMLET / NEW HISTORICISM / THEOLOGICAL
This essay examines “the problematic ‘poetry’
of Hamlet as an expression of the [Elizabethan] period’s
apocalyptic concerns” (87). Prophetic signs (e.g., eclipse,
a nova, the Armada’s defeat) heightened a sense of millenarian
expectations in Shakespeare’s audience (88-89). Hamlet
contains “an ominous sign foreshadowing ‘some strange
eruption’” that “endows the play with a haunted
sense of eschatology” and that “embodies and objectifies
an apocalyptic ethos”: the Ghost (89). Interestingly, “fury,
almost a violent ecstasy, is first and foremost triggered by the
fatal encounter with the Ghost, that is, by an eschatological provocation”
(91). A brief history of self-flagellation shows “that the
eschatological ethos induced an ascetic self-torture in the hope
of purging earthly sins from the body” as well as “engendered
self-righteous violence towards Jews (and Turks), people marked
as fatal sinners and Antichrist in the Christian tradition”
(90). This combination is labeled “oxymoronic violence”
(91). In Hamlet, the Prince alternates between “extrovert
and introverted violence” (92): he berates himself and attacks
all perceived sinners (e.g., Gertrude, Ophelia). He “is too
intensely possessed with a disgust at fleshly corruption”
rather that with an interest in revenge (93). While Hamlet parallels
radical sects (95), Claudius is similar to King James; both rulers
fear the danger of “fantasies” or madness, “a
real political threat” to any throne (96). Shakespeare’s
play “is a cultural rehearsal of an apocalyptic psychodrama
which lies close to the heart of the Christian West” (98).
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Shafer, Ronald G. “Hamlet:
Christian or Humanist?” Studies in the Humanities
17 (1991): 21-35.
HAMLET / THEOLOGICAL
Performing an “examination of biblical analogues
in the play,” this study argues “that Hamlet’s
humanism is a temporary flirtation” (22). Hamlet’s excessive
mourning over his father’s death marks the initial shift towards
humanism. The process is complete during his initial encounter with
the Ghost, when Hamlet allows “the ghost’s new commandment
to hate and kill supersede God’s commandment to love and forgive”;
ironically, “he denounces the biblical ethic with biblical
language,” suggesting his spiritual struggle (26). Without
the “comforting ideology” of Christianity, Hamlet sinks
into despair, delays action, and contemplates suicide (26-27). A
return to Christianity begins in the closet scene: Hamlet has his
mother look into her soul, and he does the same; the Ghost’s
second appearance causes Hamlet “instinctively” to return
to “his ante-humanist self” (29). These two encounters
enable Hamlet “to see through the illusions that self-based
wisdom has spawned” and “to reactivate Christian values”
(30). In the final scene, biblical references as well as parallels
between Christ and Hamlet provide evidence that Hamlet’s “journey
from Christianity to humanism and return is complete by the end
of the play” (34).
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Tiffany, Grace. “Anti-Theatricalism
and Revolutionary Desire in Hamlet (Or, the Play Without
the Play).” Upstart Crow 15 (1995): 61-74.
HAMLET / METADRAMA / NEW HISTORICISM / RHETORICAL
/ THEOLOGICAL
This essay contends that “Hamlet’s use
of the tropes of performance to combat illicit performance
parallels a paradoxical strategy which . . . proved useful in the
published pamphlets of Puritan reformers of the late sixteenth and
early seventeenth centuries”; it also discloses “the
structural centrality of these prophetic anti-theatrical discourses
to the great ‘anti-play’ of Hamlet” (63).
As the writings of Puritan reformers (e.g., Munday, Gosson, Rainolds,
Prynne) show, Puritanism’s anti-theatricalism consisted of
“three discursive elements”: “social disgust framed
in anti-theatrical terms, explicit longing for withdrawal into an
as yet unrealized world, and a call for authentic military action
to purge the present rotten state” (65). In act one, scene
two, Hamlet displays several of these characteristics: his unique
dark clothing signals “his puritanist refusal to
don the ceremonial garb worn by Gertrude, Claudius, and the rest
of the court” (65); in soliloquy, he rejects “all the
world’s ‘uses’ (ceremonies) (I. ii. 134)”
(65-66); and his “frustrated desire to return to Wittenberg
(symbolically important to Elizabethans as the originating site
of Reformation discourse) is replaced by a vaguer desire to be ‘taken
out of this world’ (recalling Prynne’s phrase)”
(66). His “resistance to illicit social theater ultimately
taints Hamlet’s response to the traveling players,”
as his soliloquy upon their exit “runs curiously parallel
to two passages in Saint Augustine’s Confessions,
oft quoted by Puritans in condemnation of playhouses” (66-67).
Paradoxically, like “the puritanist pamphlets that used the
language of play-acting to damn play-acting” (69), Hamlet’s
Mousetrap “constitutes anti-theatrical theater, employing
role-play to blast role-play” (69-70). The-play-within-the-play
also provides an example of Hamlet’s “resistance to
traditional tragic plot structures” (68): its “obviousness”
makes clear Hamlet’s “awareness of Claudius’ guilt
and his plan to punish it” (70). Hamlet rejects “the
conventional revenge behaviors of plotting, feigning, and backstabbing”
and embraces “overt military action: authentic performance
in the genuine theater of war” (71). In the play’s final
scene, Hamlet “kills Claudius openly, non-theaterically, and
spontaneously . . . he completes the total extermination
of a corrupted order” (71). “Like Renaissance puritanist
discourse, Hamlet’s rhetoric and action bespeak a mood of
the age: an unwillingness to negotiate with a culture whose institutions
were perceived as fundamentally corrupt, and an increasing preference
for the alternatives of flight or purgative destruction” (72).
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Contact the author at
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