Hamlet the Recusant

Those who search for alternative authors for the plays of Shakespeare invariably offer alternative interpretations of the plays. Oxfordians scour the plays and sonnets for veiled allusions to the life of Edward de Vere.

Well, as they say, two can play this game: John Freeman, in the aforementioned article, claims that Hamlet reflects Shakespeare's own recusant Catholic setting, particularly the hiding and double-mindedness that one had to indulge in order to be a Catholic in Elizabethan England.

Consider: The ghost voices the challenges "for a whole class of recusants" in that it "connects the plight of the evicted Purgatorial spirits to the despair of another class of 'damned souls,' the recusants of England." Hamlet is haunted by a father who appears to come from a Catholic afterlife; well, Shakespeare was the son of a recusant Catholic. The match is perfect.

Further, "much of what goes amiss in Hamlet reflects the suppression of Catholic beliefs and practices in Shakespeare's England. Indeed, the play restages a half-century of religious controversy in a thinly veiled manner." The ghost calls for revenge against the king who killed him, a veiled recusant call for revenge against the Protestant princes who have purged England of Catholic rites. Hamlet concern for incest reflects "concerns about Henry VIII's own marriage to his dead brother's widow."

Sacramental rites in Hamlet's Denmark have become ineffective: "Gertrude and Claudius's marriage and King Hamlet's hasty funeral result in an unholy mixing of the realm of the living and the realm of the dead." Catholic rites are deformed, particularly in "the 'Black Mass' that Battenhouse maintains is celebrated by Hamlet and Claudius at the play's end. From a recusant perspective, in poisoning the cup Claudius reenacts not only his murder of King Hamlet but, in a more general sense, the pollution of the Catholic sacrament." The blood of Christ has become a poisoned cup.

Hamlet has the classic recusant psychology: "Having 'that within which passes show,' Hamlet constantly reminds those around him of his nonconformity, his unwillingness to bend his own mind and thoughts to the bidding of the royal prerogative." Hamlet's divided mind is a form of "schism," and for Elizabethan Catholics schism is a form of suicide – and, waddyano? - Hamlet contemplates suicide!

posted by Peter J. Leithart on Monday, August 21, 2006 at 10:59 AM

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