An immense responsibility rests on Hamlet to revenge his father’s “foul and most unnatural murder” (1.5.25). When the truth of King Hamlet’s death is revealed, the allusion to the most infamous Christian curse placed upon Cain, casts a shadow of disquietude over Hamlet’s fate throughout the play, “The serpent that did sting thy father’s life / Now wears the crown” (1.5.39-40). The connections within Hamlet to the religious are frequent and clear: the image of the serpent, the haunting of the dead, and Hamlet’s fear for his father’s soul in Purgatory “with all his crimes broad blown, as flush as May / And how his audit stands who knows save heaven?” (3.4.81-2). However, Hamlet’s reactions to the “curse” of King Hamlet, the treatment of two “sinners”: Ophelia and Claudius, and Shakespeare’s overall depiction of revenge all serve to illustrate that Hamlet is deeply critical of how these characters rely upon their understanding of religion. Thus, Hamlet presents a failure of religion to provide authentic meaning, consolation, or justification for these characters in the context of their actions.

Religious rituals and beliefs in purgatory and prayer do not adequately serve as a framework for which Hamlet can make sense of his father’s spirit. Christian beliefs additionally fail to provide audiences justification to condemn the beautiful death of Ophelia as a hideous act of suicide. Furthermore, if Claudius feels remorse over the murder of his brother, and thusly evokes some sense of sympathy from the audience, or at least understanding, Christian audiences could even justify and possible forgive his act of murder. Without question, this play challenges audiences’ views on judgment and revenge, but because Shakespeare provides such rich examples of how traditionally Christian treatment of sin is ultimately insufficient in the context of real life because of human feelings of sympathy and empathy and the complexity of motivation, Hamlet should more rightly be regarded a secular play that chooses to investigate notions of universal morality and condemns a specifically Christian worldview.

Sister Mariam Joseph’s prominent work, “Hamlet,” A Christian Tragedy     argues that Hamlet occurs entirely within a “Christian atmosphere” and that all of the characters are “Christian characters” confronted by moral problems essential to the work as a “Christian tragedy.” Joseph believes that Hamlet is undoubtedly a Christian tragedy because all of the characters embody a “Christian mentality and use Christian terms” (125). Like most scholars, Joseph focuses on Hamlet’s delay in murdering Claudius. Joseph believes that Hamlet’s “tragic flaw” is not his cowardice in his inability to act on revenge, but in that he went against his father’s spirit, and in doing so went against God, and developed hatred toward both Claudius and his mother when he was ordered to allow his duty to “taint” his mind (131). Analyses of Hamlet similar to Joseph’s frequently view Hamlet as a tragic hero, one that is compelled to follow the demands of the ghost, or even the expectations of God, but fails to do so.

Audiences which do not consider Hamlet to be a “Christian tragedy” typically endorse an idealistic view of Hamlet which has historically been tied to his Goethian interpretation as a man who is weakened by a lack of initiative (Diamond 4), However, Diamond stresses that such interpretations of Hamlet as tragic hero greatly inflate Hamlet’s true character. Additionally, scholars seem to overlook the fact that Hamlet acts with zero hesitation in shamelessly murdering Polonius as well as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. The image of Hamlet as a cowardly, emotional scholar has permeated most modern interpretations of the play. Diamond believes that scholars have neglected consideration of Shakespeare’s values when they idealize Hamlet or at the least, mistake the protagonist Hamlet as the hero Hamlet. He believed that Shakespeare was certainly not a fatalist and had no intention of convincing audiences that Hamlet was in anyway obligated to avenge his father’s murder. Diamond uses Bradley’s criteria for Shakespearean tragedies to argue that human action, not human inaction, are always the sources of turmoil and catastrophe in plays (96), and thus, Diamond believes Shakespeare was highly critical of the self-righteous quest for vengeance. 

Indeed, Hamlet historically has been regarded as one of Shakespeare’s greatest tragedies. It is no surprise to Shakespearian audiences that by the end of this tragedy Hamlet’s father, Hamlet, Hamlet’s mother, Gertrude, Hamlet’s uncle, Claudius, as well as his romantic interest Ophelia and her father, Polonius, have all been murdered by another or, presumably, by their own hand. Following this, another “revenger,” Fortinbras, whose father was killed by King Hamlet, takes the throne. Giving credence to Diamond’s essay, Hamlet’s plot allows many audiences and scholars to believe that Shakespeare was apathetic to Hamlet’s personal goal to murder his father’s murderer. With the entire family dead at the end of the performance, it is easy to suggest that no one has benefited from revenge. However, it is just as easy to infer that Shakespeare is suggesting that revenge is simply an integral part of the human condition. In the repeating cycle of revenge, Hamlet is simply replaced by his foil Fortinbras, an impulsive and decisive man of action.

Does Shakespeare, though, truly desire his audiences to accept vengeance as a natural human phenomenon?  Literary critic Harry Levin expresses, “With Shakespeare, the dramatic resolution conveys us, beyond the man-made sphere of poetic justice, toward the ever-receding horizons of cosmic irony” (280).  Levin explores the use of irony in Hamlet. His analysis focuses less on whether not Hamlet is explicitly a religious text, but instead reveals that Hamlet a major work of dramatic irony. This allows Shakespeare to criticize aspects of society and the court indirectly through imagery and plot.

The only “survivor” within this play that seems to remains is the idea of memory. Hamlet’s perpetual concern for his remembrance, as well as his “curse” to remember his own father exists throughout the story until its end. By instilling sympathy for both Ophelia and Claudius, as well as turning Hamlet into a tragic character who essentially “misses” the meaning of revenge, Shakespeare uses the stage to provide real examples in which Christianity, Catholic or Protestant, fails to truly provide a means by which to judge the actions of these characters. Hamlet, in the end of the play asks that his friend Horatio “Tell my story” (5.2.323). At this point in the play, Shakespeare has presented the consequences of revenge, and yet its cyclical and persistent existence within human society. Shakespeare has not upheld the power of prayer nor the virtue of repentance, nor has he explicitly stated if one should judge those who commit suicide or fear the afterlife. This reveals that Hamlet may have moral implications regarding the false motivations of revenge, but nonetheless, it is still not to be interpreted as a religious work.

Critic Lars Engle argues that above all else, Hamlet passionately desires to be noble amidst the court of ignoble people around him. Hamlet is preoccupied with a moral dilemma, not necessarily a challenge of faith or a religious fear. Engle writes, “The concern shapes the question he asks over and over: whether it is nobler to take violent action that may compromise his own nobility by having ignoble consequences (and will also almost certainly result in his own death), or to put up with the pain of enduring an unsatisfactory relation to his world in which no opportunities for noble agency present themselves (Moral Agency in Hamlet 93). It is because of this “moral crossroads” that other critics, such as Preston Thomas Roberts, Jr., believe that Hamlet has such a universal appeal and relevance in Western society. However, the most well-known of all English morality plays, Everyman, is steeped in religious implications. New Historian critic Stephen Greenblatt explains in his essay Hamlet in Purgatory that Everyman was essentially the story of man’s attempt to escape a sudden death and in doing so, be certain to have the opportunity to repent before his time came (300). 

Thus, audiences may make one of two connections between Hamlet and Everyman. The first connection is that Hamlet indeed is intended to have religious connotations and that Purgatory in Hamlet is a real place and Hamlet’s fears of the afterlife are predominately his reason to hesitate in action. However, with so much evidence existing to point toward the likelihood of Shakespeare’s criticism of Hamlet’s character, a separate, more accurate connection is to be made. This inference is that Hamlet was never intended to support Christian ideology. Shakespeare’s use of irony reveals that morality should not be judged according to Christian ethics. Rather, Hamlet is not “Everyman” but he is representative of an authentic man who cannot decide what to do and who cannot rely on religious ritual or traditional forms of justice to find the most noble course of action.

Perhaps, though, so much emphasis on the solely religious context of Hamlet has overshadowed the play’s general historical context.  An overarching theme of Hamlet explored  is that of identity. From the moment Hamlet gives the “To Be or Not To Be” soliloquy (3.1.57-91), Hamlet becomes a character commonly associated with the search for authenticity, inauthenticity, being, consciousness, creativity, and identity. Additionally, modern audiences sometimes have difficulty accepting Hamlet’s actual age of thirty because he resembles so much of today’s quintessential young adult searching for some sense of truth in a world of contradiction. Hamlet’s fascination with the players in the “Mousetrap” scene, as well as his “antic disposition” expresses Hamlet’s almost hyper-awareness of what others seem to be and who or what they actually are.

Critic Eric Levy describes this theme throughout the play as “the primacy of inwardness problematized by the need for outward confirmation of its content” (715). Both Greenblatt and Levy point out that during the sixteenth century “there appears to be an increased self-consciousness about the fashioning of human identity as a manipulable, artful process” (715).  Indeed, the sixteenth century “Renaissance Humanism” stressed moral suasion and accessibility in literature, a focus on moral philosophy, evangelicalism, and philosopher such has Petrarch renounced Scholastic thought as a means of acquiring a virtuous life. Christian leaders such as Erasmus and Luther were both highly influenced by Renaissance humanism. Ronald Knowles believed that Shakespeare was attracted to the popular genre of revenge tragedy specifically because it gave him an opportunity to delve into the suffering of an individual, the particular, as this individual discovered their subjectivity (1063).

Twenty-first century audiences may believe that such a focus on the individual is highly modern, and may even extend this to very thorough and compelling arguments in favor of the text as an existentialist play. Subjectivity, however, was not necessarily unique during the Renaissance, nor was the search for authenticity. Critic John Schwindt in particular criticizes those who search for an element of “absurdity” in Hamlet. To do so, Schwindt believes, is greatly anachronistic (4). Schwindt illustrates that it was not Kierkegaard, nor the existentialists, that first focused on the absurdity of the human condition, but rather Martin Luther who first stressed that, “God is so effectively hidden, if you regard and follow the judgment of human reason, you are forced to say, either there is no God, or that God is unjust” (5).  The God of radical, free-will which Luther professes causes such great feelings of “alienation and estrangement” (4) for humankind, must have some relevancy in Hamlet. As Greenblatt writes, Hamlet becomes a story about “a young man from Wittenberg, with a distinctly Protestant temperament [who is] haunted by a distinctly Catholic ghost” (309).

Hamlet seems directly placed within the Catholic versus Protestant debates regarding the existence of Purgatory during sixteenth century England. Despite the establishment of the officially recognized Protestant Church of England at the start of the English Reformation, the opponents of the Reformation, such as Thomas More, emphatically defended the Catholic belief in the existence of purgatory. Simon Fish’s A Supplication for the Beggars, an anti-Catholic work which rejected purgatory and declared it to be a tool of the Catholic Church used to guilt those of the faith into making church donations: “And also if that the pope with his pardons for money may deliuer one soule thens: he may deliuer him aswel without money, if he may deliuer one, he may deliuer a thousand: yf he may deliuer a thousand he may deliuer theim all, and so destroy purgatory. And then is he a cruell tyraunt without all charite if he kepe theim there in pryson and in paine till men will giue him money” (10).  Fish is particularly resentful of the clergy for amassing wealth while the poor never benefited from donations, as well as prayers, offered to the Church in hopes that loved ones would save the souls of the deceased from Purgatory. The Catholic counter-argument to Fish, The Supplication of Souls, written by Thomas More detailing the suffering of those souls who go “unclean” without the works of their families on earth, also seems prevalent within the play, as well.

Hamlet appears to be familiar with both arguments for and against Purgatory when he first encounters the ghost of his father. Hamlet is suspicious of the exact intention of this spirit he is seeing and is unsure if it is the work of Satan, a Protestant mindset, or the suffering soul of a father trapped in Purgatory, the Catholic view:

Be thou a spirit of health or goblin damned,

Bring with thee airs from heaven or blasts from hell,

Be they intents wicket or charitable,

Thou com’st in such a questionable shape

That I will speak to thee. I’ll call thee Hamlet,

King, father, royal Dane. Oh, answer me! (1.5.40-5)

Hamlet’s father reveals that he was murdered by his brother and pleads that Hamlet swear to “revenge his foul and most unnatural murder” (1.5.26). Hamlet believes he is then obligated to replace his love of books and “pressures past” (1.5.100)  to revenge the soul of his father which is now trapped in an “eternal blazon,” a “list” of “days confined to fast in fires / till the foul crimes done in my days of nature / are burnt and purged away” (1.5.21, 12-4). This indicates that Hamlet has ultimately interpreted his encounter with this ghost as an agreement that he will revenge the act of murder by murdering his uncle. Because of this, Hamlet is viewed by many that he accepts the Catholic belief in purgatory.

            Though Hamlet clearly has intentions to now go forth and murder his uncle, that Shakespeare would intend for his audience to believe Hamlet should go forth remains entirely unclear. In the words of the spirit of King Hamlet, it is explicit that his soul, assuming that it truly now resides in Purgatory, is to remain there for a fixed time period regardless of the actions of Hamlet for his soul is “doomed for a certain term to walk the night” (1.5.11). In addition to the King asking his son to revenge his death, he never directly asks Hamlet to swear to murder his murderer, only to revenge the act of murder. The spirit also urges Hamlet to “Remember me” (1.5.91) and to “Taint not thy mind, nor let they soul contrive / Against thy mother aught. Leave her to heaven” (1.5.85-6). Thus, for Hamlet the meaning of “revenge” becomes clearer: he is to murder his uncle. For Shakespeare, however, this concept of revenge is still left to interpretation.

             If perhaps Shakespeare intended to promote the Christian ideals of peace and forgiveness, “Recompense no man evil for evil” (Romans 12:17), it seems counterproductive for his story to end with a revenger restoring order within Denmark. Hamlet thus seems to become a play about Christians who fear the afterlife but are unable to leave justice to God, as the Bible teaches Christians to do so. And yet, Shakespeare’s intent is not so simplistic, nor so religious. In addition to representing such contradictions between Christian morals and the true actions of Christians on stage, Shakespeare also complicates the relationship between Christian ideas that concern suicide and murder and the sympathetic nature of humanity. The death of Ophelia and the repentance of Claudius challenge fundamentalist interpretations of the Bible because they invoke pity for the sinner.

Ophelia’s character has become synonymous with chastity, purity, innocence. In the acclaimed collection of Shakespearean criticism Four Lectures on Shakespeare, Benjamin Blom describes her character, “Her brain, her soul and her body are all pathetically weak…Ophelia is really mad, not merely metaphorically mad-with grief” (163). This perception of Ophelia as “weak” has frequently dominated Western’s culture’s collective view of her character, primarily due to her relationship to others characters within the play, as well as her suicide. Many audiences have traditionally minimalized Ophelia’s madness to mere emotional hysteria, fear, or, in Hamlet’s words, “frailty.”

Many scholars focus on Ophelia’s relationship to her father, Polonius, and her brother, Laertes, to establish these conclusions regarding her “weakness.” More appropriately, it may be said that Ophelia is not necessarily physically, psychologically, or emotionally weak, but rather, she entirely lacks agency as a female character. Elaine Showalter was the first to criticize the historical tendency for scholarship to consistently focus on the weakness of Ophelia, “to reappropriate [Ophelia] for our own ends; to dissolve her into a female symbolism of absence is to endorse our own marginality; to make her Hamlet’s anima is to reduce her to a metaphor of male experience” (223).

The image of Ophelia as a delicate child, dependent upon  her father and her brother is established early in the play. Her brother, Laertes instills doubt and fear in Ophelia, and warns her that Hamlet is a fickle man most interested in her out of lust rather than love: “Or lose your heart, or your chaste treasure open  / To his unamstered importunity./ Fear Ophelia, fear it, my dear sister” (1.3.30-3).  Her father, too, attempts to persuade Ophelia to avoid Hamlet. Polonius, like Laertes, stresses the necessity of Ophelia’s chastity, “Think of yourself a baby  / Tender yourself more dearly,  / Wronging it thus-you’ll tender me a fool.” (1.3. 104, 6, 8).” In the earliest scenes in which Ophelia is a major character, she is viewed as passive to both her father and brother, dependent on their protection and advice, and confused, seemingly weak, and obedient to their orders to stay away from Hamlet.

Showalter, however, argues that this interpretation of Ophelia does not due her character justice. Rather, she has been depicted as such to suit society’s male-centric expectations of what the young Ophelia should symbolize. It would be a mistake of the reader or audience member would be to overlook the significance of Ophelia’s lack of agency. She is not merely doing as her father and brother please, nor succumbing so societal expectations. She lives within a world in which she incapable of perceiving herself as anything but the image of a woman that these men have expected her to fulfill.  As Showalter explains, “In Elizabethan slang, “nothing” was a term for the female genitalia, as in Much Ado about Nothing. To Hamlet, then, (“nothing”) is what lies between maids’ legs, for, in the male visual system of representation and desire, women’s sexual organs, in the words of the French psychoanalyst Luce Irigaray, ‘represent the horror of having nothing to see’” (Qtd. in Showalter 222). This draws attention to Ophelia’s inability to think of herself as an individual.  The language of Ophelia’s environment, which perpetuates the image of her as “nothing,” reinforces her own absorption into a created reality in which she is secondary to men.

            When confronted with danger or fear without her father and brother around, Ophelia frequently attempts to find refuge in prayer. When Hamlet later refuses Ophelia, “I loved you not” (3.1.119), and urges her to “Get thee to a nunnery” (3.1.122), Ophelia responds by praying and pleading for Hamlet to be forgiven, “Oh, help him, you sweet heavens!” (134). Ophelia has been denied by Hamlet and her father murdered, thus her “madness” ensues. Ophelia’s perceived hysteria most affects the Queen who refuses to even speak to her. Ophelia suggests that she and the Queen have different reasons to have sorrow and repentance: “There’s fennel for you, and columbines. There’s rue for you, and here’s some for me; we may call it “herb of grace” o’Sundays. You may wear your rue with a difference” (4.5.174-77).

Though Ophelia’s crazed singing appears erratic, her words reveal that she may actually have the greatest sense of awareness of any other character in the play. Laertes even recognizes that there is intention in Ophelia’s singing: “This nothing’s more than matter” (4.5.169). Ophelia’s flowers represent that she is at least partially knowledgeable of the faults of those within the court to have failed Hamlet and her own downfall as a single woman with no one to depend upon. Ophelia’s “madness” allows her a sense of agency to speak her mind and be free for the first time. Rather than a descent into her tragic end, Ophelia’s madness is also her anagnorisis. The unraveling of Ophelia as a meek female is the creation of an assertive and passionate woman. Ophelia’s last lines “And all of Christians’ souls. God be wi’you” (4.5.193), can be viewed literally. However, if this is Ophelia’s anagnorisis, she is likely renouncing her former dependence on religion and prayer. Knowing that Ophelia later commits suicide, her last words seem more of a warning than of an invocation of God’s grace.

            Ophelia’s death, as seen by her community, is regarded as suicide, and therefore as sin: “She should in ground unsanctified been lodged / Till the last trumpet. For charitable prayers, / Flints and pebbles should be thrown on her” (5.1.209-11). Despite having not received a full Christian burial, Ophelia’s death is depicted gracefully, pure, innocent, and beautiful. Furthermore, her death is not described as anything similar to that which audiences would likely attribute to the death of a sinner:

                        Her clothes spread wide,

            And mermaid-like awhile they bore her up,

            Which time she chanted snatches of old lauds,

            As one incapable of her own distress,

Or like a creature native and endued

            Unto that element. But long it could it not be

            Till her garments, heavy with their drink,

            Pulled the poor wretch from her melodious lay

            To muddy death (5.1.174-82)

The “muddy” death of Ophelia hints to her probable loss of virginity which Shakespeare is not neglectful to imply to his audience.  Though her death is “unclean,” her peaceful and natural descent into the water is one of literature’s most beautiful and captivating scenes. Ophelia’s graceful drowning is depicted as though it purifies and cleanses her of any wrong. Her death becomes, for Shakespeare, more like a sacrifice than as another tragic event in the rotting state of Denmark.

For an audience, Shakespeare has just deliberately created a dilemma: is Ophelia to be regarded as a sinner for her suicide or is she a martyr? Keeping in mind that Shakespeare did remind the audience that Ophelia was not a virgin, “Before you tumbled me, / You promised me to wed” (4.5.62-3), it seems that Shakespeare it still attempting to challenge his audience, to encourage people to think critically about their religious beliefs. If Hamlet is to be taken at face-value as a Catholic text, and Ophelia’s death is considered to be a sin, just as audiences should assume Hamlet’s father’s soul resides in Purgatory to be released, then there should be no pity for Ophelia. And yet, audiences feel pity because her death is so full of pathos. Ophelia is not only a victim of a revenge tragedy (the revenge of both Hamlet and her brother Laertes at this point in the play), but also a victim of society: she is fatherless and possibly no longer a virgin. Despite her purity of character, Ophelia is a product of societal oppression. Because there is sympathy of Ophelia, the audience’s response to her death is contradictory to strict Christian interpretations of the Bible which would lead audiences to judge her as unchaste.

            Claudius’ attempt to repent likewise complicates our human response to another form of sin: murder and avarice. Some productions of Hamlet omit Claudius’ “prayer scene” during which Claudius reveals that he murdered his brother out of love for Gertrude. Claudius expresses his immense feelings of guilt and regret, but his passion for that which he has amassed as king keeps him from seeking forgiveness.  In omitting this scene, many performances ensure Claudius to be a most hated villain. On the other hand, to keep this scene and portray Claudius in a weak state and alone, his soliloquy reveals a complexity of his guilt:

                        And what’s prayer but this two-fold force,

            To be forestalled ere we come to fall,

            Or pardon’d being down?

            Then I’ll look up;

            But, O, what form of prayer

            Can serve my turn? “Forgive me my foul murder”?

            That cannot be; since I am still possess’d

            …………………………………………………..

            May one be pardon’d and retain th’offence? (3.3.48-54,56)                                    

Claudius laments because he cannot bring himself to pray and the more he tries, the more he becomes consumed by the conscious of his guilt.  In this speech, the audience can see that Claudius is not merely attempting to repent to save his soul; rather, he recognizes the extreme brevity of the act to which he is asking forgiveness and he himself cannot bring himself to ask that he be forgiven. If Claudius were a true villain, a sinner in all ways possible, a disingenuous repentance would likely be easy, or, he would go along without any pause to repent whatsoever.

            He does not do this, however. Rather, Claudius is weakened and physically unable to get down on his knees and ask that prayer relieve him of sins that he knows prayer cannot. From this scene, Shakespeare does attack the Catholic belief in repenting; sins are not easily wiped away when one repents, rather, it is the memory of their sinful actions that will haunt them and no prayer will relieve them of this. Likewise, Shakespeare evokes a sense of pity for Claudius because they recognize within Claudius something that is inherently human: desire. Claudius is a victim of his own refusal to let go of his worldly and emotional possessions (for instance, his love for Gertrude) and publically denounce his position as king.                    

The repentance of Claudius and the beautiful suicide of Ophelia clearly provide evidence to show that Shakespeare in no way endorses the religious dogmas that surround Catholic sin and purgatory.  The religious setting of Hamlet does, however, have historical significance. Claudius’ repentance perhaps reflects the change in attitude of those during the medieval period who were becoming increasingly critical of the Catholic practice of offering indulgences and general corruption of the clergy.  There is sympathy for Claudius, but audiences still recognize the hopelessness of his state and essentially the insignificance of his fate in Hell in comparison to the “Hell” he has already made for himself on earth of guilt and fear. This issue encourages the audiences to reevaluate whether life after death must exist in order for human ethics to exist, or rather, if it is acceptable for sins to be “forgiven” if simply admitting guilt is all that is necessary for an individual to express.

Hamlet may appear to solely be a product of the historical context of the Reformation. However, though Shakespeare may have represented and possible encouraged doubt in the Catholic Church the tragedy of Ophelia still remains external to these arguments surrounding religion. Shakespeare may have desired to present the inconsistencies and failures of Catholicism, but in the example of Ophelia, the moment in which her character essentially comes into the light, her faith in religion is abandoned altogether. Ophelia is strengthened in her absence of religion. Religion, for Ophelia, becomes simply another source of oppression and self-deception. For Shakespeare to equivocate religion to male power, it not necessarily only Catholic faith which is criticized, but religion as whole is seemingly superfluous to the human condition.

Hamlet thus reveals ways in which faith, whether Catholic of Protestant, is wholly unsuccessful in providing a sense of ethics or consolation for the characters within the play. The work as a whole favors a worldview that is entirely secular. Evoking sympathy for Claudius and Ophelia, who should have been considered to be sinners, brings attention t to an authentic human struggle to deal with denial, guilt, oppression, and identity.  Hamlet provided a means by which theology could be left out of public debate and instead, life’s greatest questions surrounding death, remembrance, madness, love, suicide, and fate could take place onstage and force audiences to recognize the actuality of the society around them rather than partaking in otherwise self-deceiving habits of pinning one church against another or clutching to religion as a source of answers.

Works Cited