Old King, New King, Eclipsed Sons, and Abandoned Altars in "Hamlet"
Author(s): Elizabeth S. Watson
Reviewed work(s):
Source: The Sixteenth Century Journal, Vol. 35, No. 2 (Summer, 2004), pp. 475-491
Published by: The Sixteenth Century Journal
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SixteenthCenturyJournal
XXXV/2 (2004)
Old King, New King, Eclipsed Sons,
and Abandoned Altars in Hamlet
Elizabeth S. Watson
Morgan State University
In Hamlet, Shakespeare's wordplay creates patterns of doubling, splitting, loss, and
replacement thatmimic the situations of not only the dramatic characters,but also the
changing English church of the Reformation period. Puns provide verbal cues to
remind the audience of the curtailing of old Roman rites, especially communion,
burial practices, sanctuary, and prayer.They also draw attention to replacements of
material furnishings of the church by the numerous allusions to tables, the arras,and
the royalbed, all of which serve as reminders of the replacement of altarsby reformers.
Old religious practices have been secularized and adapted for the stage,but theword
play attests to an ambivalence about the shifts in rites and to anxiety about iconoclastic
change.
"WORDS,WORDS,WORDS," responds Hamlet to Polonius's query about the subject
of his reading (2.2.292).1 Hamlet's antic response falls within a verbal clash in
which words most certainly have not been emptied of meaning: Hamlet insists on
interpreting "What is the matter?" as a request for an explanation of what is trou
is the unstated, underlying point of interest for Polonius
bling him-which
while Polonius insists that he is only inquiring about the subject matter. Hamlet
then rejoins with an insult to Polonius, citing a text describing old men as having,
weakness within the pia and
among other weaknesses, "a plentiful lack of wit"-a
dura mater of the brain (2.2.199). Thus, words in their duplicity and multiplicity
of meanings are willfully deployed as tactics of disguise and challenges to dissem
bling; they cannot be stripped of their suggestiveness, even when the added mean
ings are partially submerged or shadowy. Such burdened words in Hamlet not only
serve as signs of young Hamlet's internal turmoil and his circumscribed rights as a
prince passed over for succession and now under surveillance, but they also func
tion as verbal cues to a mix of unresolved
issues, especially those concerning
changes in the religious practice and material culture of sixteenth-century English
is the matter is the altered state of Elsinore: in Hamlet's Denmark,
churches.What
as in England,
religious observances have been abridged and altars removed.
1
William
Shakespeare, The Norton Shakespeare, Based on the Oxford Edition, ed. Stephen Greenblatt
et al. (New York: Norton,
texts
1997). All references to the text of Hamlet and to other Shakespearean
are taken from this edition. However,
edition
passages from quarto 2 that are italicized in the Norton
will not be so marked in this paper.
475
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476 SixteenthCenturyJournal XXXV/2 (2004)
One of the vexed questions arising from critical readings of Hamlet is just what
does play a role in the tragedy. Do Catholic, mainstream Prot
kind of Christianity
estant, Puritan, pietistic, or even skeptical views prevail?2 If the twentieth-century
reactions to religious signs inHamlet are somixed, then would not the English audi
ence of the early seventeenth
theological
century-still
troubled by conflicting
claims after successive phases of Protestant
tragedy's mixed
signs as well?3 One
approach
spiritual and
reform-have
noted
to the shifting religious ground
the
in
Hamlet is through puns and wordplay, because these slippery words create some of
the ambiguity surrounding religious concerns or serve as verbal hints at issues not
fully articulated. Although puns double the signification of words, they point not
just to situations
involving doubling
and splitting, but also to those that suggest a
loss or absence and to those that indicate replacement. Such wordplay
ical devices, clusters of sound patterns, etymological
uses rhetor
links, and bilingual
(or inter
lingual) puns.4 Jacques Lacan observes, "One of Hamlet's functions is to engage in
constant punning, wordplay, double entendres-to
play on ambiguity."5 The abun
dance and range of wordplay suggest that punning in the tragedy mimics analogous
in Hamlet is remarkable: for his
of Shakespeare's reHgious position
2The range of interpretations
to the Church of England, see critics such as Huston Diehl, Staging Reform, Reforming the
conformity
Press, 1997),
Stage: Protestantism and Popular Theater in Early Modern England (Ithaca: CorneU University
and the Church," in Shakespeare's Universe: Renaissance Ideas and Con
92; and G. K. Hunter,"Shakespeare
ventions: Essays inHonour ofWR. Elton, ed. John M. Mucciolo,
Steven J. Doloff,
and Edward A. Rau
CathoHc tendencies are represented by, among others, Peter
chut (Aldershot: Scolar, 1996), 21. Roman
in The Catholicism of Shakespeare's Plays (London: Saint Austen,
1997), 46; and Burton Raffel,
"Shakespeare and the CathoHc Question," Religion & Literature 30 (1998): 49. For amore Calvinist view
point inHamlet, see Alan Sinfield, Faultlines: Cultural Materialism and the Politics ofDissident Reading (Ber
of California
for a more Lutheran
Press, 1992), 228-30;
keley: University
reading, see Raymond
"Lutheran Hamlet," English Language Notes 27 (1989): 35-39; and Steve Sohmer, Shakes
Waddington,
Press,
peare's Mystery Play .The Opening of the Globe Theatre 1599 (Manchester: Manchester
University
241. Some critics see competing
1999), 226-29,
religious forces in Hamlet: Gene Fendt, for example,
identifies Hamlet,
the Ghost, and OpheHa with the old reHgion s generosity and copiousness, but con
siders the ending an unfortunate
triumph of Puritan values of thrift and materiaHsm. See Gene Fendt,
Is "Hamlet" a Religious Drama? An Essay on a Question inKierkegaard (M?waukee: Marquette University
M?ward
Press, 1998), 16.
of four stages through which
3For an identification
"The Elizabethan
Church
place, see Patrick ColHnson,
the Reformation
took
(or Reformations)
and the New Religion,"
in The Reign of
Elizabeth I, ed. Christopher Haigh
(London: MacmiUan,
1984), 169-93.
name types of puns: antanaclasis plays on multiple meanings
of one word; syl
4Rhetorical
figures
uses of the same word; paronomasia plays on words sim?ar in sound but different
lepsis plays on multiple
in meaning;
see, for example, Brian Vickers, Classical Rhetoric in English Poetry, rev. ed. (Carbondale:
IUinois University
CaU of the
Press, 1989), 129, 143, 146, 148; and Jonathan CuUer,"The
in On Puns: The Foundation of Letters, ed. Jonathan CuUer (New York: Black
Introduction,"
between
sound
weU, 1988), 4-5. A Hnguistic classification of puns based on the degree of congruence
see There's aDouble Tongue: An Inves
and speUing of the words has been formulated by Dirk Delabastita;
tigation into theTranslation of Shakespeare's Wordplay with Special Reference to "Hamlet" (Amsterdam: Rodopi,
see
puns, such as Lamord/death or plus/plures/pleurisy,
1983), 81. Hamlet offers b?ingual and mult?ingual
Southern
Phoneme:
Margaret W Ferguson, "Hamlet: Letters and Spirits," in Shakespeare and theQuestion ofTheory, ed. Patricia
Parker and Geoffrey Hartman
(New York: Methuen,
1985), 301?5; andT. McAHndon,
Shakespeare's
Press, 1991), 115.
Tragic Cosmos (Cambridge: Cambridge University
in Hamlet," ed. Jacques-Alain MiUer,
of Desire
5Jacques Lacan, "Desire and the Interpretation
trans. James Hulbert,
in Literature and Psychoanalysis: The Question of Reading: Otherwise, ed. Shoshana
Felman
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University
Press, 1980), 33.
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/ Wordplay,Ambivalence, & Anxiety
Watson
situations of doubling,
in "Hamlet"
477
loss, and replacement both for the dramatic characters and
for the emergent English church of the Reformation.
The work of puns-the
let's inner world of emotion
doubling and splitting-bridges
gaps between Ham
and spirit and the outer world of religious practice and
historical events. Shifts and changes on one plane have their equivalents on another
plane as well, with puns pointing to change embodied in the portrayal of the two
fathers, enacted in burial and prayer scenes and imaged in the material signs. First,
two fathers and various
on the internal level, the problems of accommodating
rivals, as well
as the issue of mourning,
have been frequently examined. Puns are
interpreted as symptoms of psychological paralysis and emotions constrained by a
situation impossible to resolve; but this paralysis can be further linked towhat Lacan
sees as the issue "of central importance:
own
loss and for his mother's
seeming
insufficient mourning," both for Hamlet's
lack of loss.6 The splitting and doubling
forces Hamlet into odd, three-way relationships with those closest to him. Not only
does the rivalry with his parents place the son into a relationship that is the opposite
of aHoly Family, but the son is also one member of an unholy trinity that is subject
to the competing wills of the (step)father and ghost.7 The parallel levels of loss and
replacement suggested by forms of verbal play begin with Hamnlet's transmutation
of his situation to a verbal but oblique expression of it. In his rejection of his father's
replacement, he argues through puns that force an unwilling recognition of their
double-edged attacks. Hamlet's play on sun and son and air and heir (1.2.67; 3.2.85)
and Claudius to acknowledge the problem of rightful rule and
in his "inky" mourning
clothes, the son of the rightful, Phoebuslike
king darkly alludes to his eclipsed hopes and the clouds passing between him and
loss.Hamlet bitterly rejects former friends
the throne of the elder Hamlet-another
for their complicity with the replacement king: Ophelia, through double entendres
on "nunneries" (3.1.122, 137, 148) and lying in laps (3.2.101), which force her to
admit she gets the obscene meanings before she can then defend herself; Rosen
cranz and Guildenstern,
through a series of puns that compel them to admit their
underhanded role.
Beyond Hamlet's inner world and immediate situation, the work of puns as
in the play can be viewed as analogous to the
doubling, splitting, and mirroring
requires Gertrude
succession;
process of the Reformation
in Europe, where parts of Christianity
split off from the
their own structures. For the English church, more
than doubling takes place: just as the two fathers represent not only doubling but
loss and replacement, so the succession of churches also signifies doubling, loss, and
Roman
church and fashioned
6M. M. Mahood,
1957), 113, 164; Anna K. Nardo, The
Shakespeare's Wordplay (London: Methuen,
of New York Press, 1991),
Ludic Self in Seventeenth-Century English Literature (Albany: State University
and Lacan, "Desire and the Interpretation of Desire," 39.
15-17,20,33;
7C. L. Barber, "The Family in Shakespeare's Development:
Tragedy and Sacredness," in Represent
ing Shakespeare: New Psychoanalytic Essays, ed. Murray M. Schwartz and Copp?lia Kahn
(Baltimore:
is further complicated by the feminine element?
Press, 1980), 26. Doubling
Johns Hopkins University
the two fathers of the "triangulated choice"; see Janet Adelman,
placing Gertrude between
Suffocating
Mothers: Fantasies ofMaternal Origin, "Hamlet" to "The Tempest" (New York: Routledge,
1992), 12.
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478
Sixteenth Century Journal XXXV/2
replacement. The
two fathers, furthermore, differ in their associations with
ing rites, religious practices,
fathers who
(2004)
compete
traditional customs,
for Hamlet's
and new church requirements,
compliance
and church
chang
furnishings. These
evoke some conflicts between
conflicts which
in turn make Hamlet's
old
indecision
more understandable.
For ramifications
of changes projected
back onto
a medieval
Danish
state,
Shakespeare's contemporaries would have looked to their own time. Historically,
the Reformation was not yet deeply rooted in English popular culture by the end
of the sixteenth century, although the theological and legal structures had been in
place since early in Elizabeth's reign and the larger urban areaswere effectively con
trolled.Yet the slow progress of reform generated some further problems. Even in
the 1590s there were pockets of resistance to the orders to abandon old rites and to
remove altars, images, and such symbols of church wealth as rich cloths, jeweled
crucifixes, silver communion ware, and costly embroidered vestments.8 Such resis
into the royal palaces, since the Tudors did not give up the lux
urious fittings of their private chapels, whatever
their public policies; thus,
Elizabeth I kept not only her communion
table but also its crucifix in the same
tance also extended
place where
the altar had traditionally stood.9 Further resistance occurred among
the laity, some of whom continued
to practice Roman Catholicism
in secret.
Whereas once the laity had taken part in processions and gestures of prayer, the
reform attacks on ritual patterns of kneeling and other overt signs of devotion led
at times to a resentful disrespect and disruptiveness among parishioners during ser
There continued
to be some divisiveness
vices, or to their nonattendance.10
between clergy and parish, between older clergy trained in the Roman
tradition
and younger ones coming out of the more Calvinist universities, and even between
crown and clergy.11 Finally, the Reformation
brought with it a sense of loss. To
Eamon Duffy, the Roman church, whatever its superstitions and inadequacies, had
developed practices that led to parish cohesiveness and a generally satisfying sense
of devotion
and piety among
the strongest sense of loss
itsmembers.12 Although
Church of England, the Catholics
and the People," in Reign ofElizabeth
8Christopher Haigh,"The
in England c.l400-c.
1580
I, 196?97; and Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of theAltars: Traditional Religion
Press, 1992), 451,455,485.
(New Haven:Yale University
9Simon Thurley, The Royal Palaces of Tudor England: Architecture and Court Life 1460-1541
(New
Press for Paul Mellon
Haven: Yale University
Centre for Studies in British Art, 1993), 205. How much
Shakespeare would have known
cent rooms is uncertain.
about
the actual furnishing
of the royal chapels and their private
"Elizabethan Church
and New Religion,"
189;
10Collinson,
and People," 198-99. Some of the disrespect was a form
Catholics,
see Alexandra Walsham,
Church
attending only to avoid prosecution;
in
Modern
Polemic
(1993; repr.,Woodbridge:
Early
England
Confessional
11The
licensing of clergy with degrees in theology required by
adja
and Haigh, "Church of England,
of protest by the "church papists,"
Papists: Catholicism, Conformity and
1999), 89?91.
Boydell,
the new statutes was to have coun
tered complaints about the ignorance of many former Catholic priests; but, because of funding prob
lems, many churches again found themselves with poorly trained preachers or temporary substitutes
and New Religion,"
184-87). Areas that remained heavily Catholic
(Collinson, "Elizabethan Church
and People," 202-5). On confiscation
of local
fared little better (Haigh, "Church of England, Catholics,
see Duffy, Stripping of theAltars, esp. 455?56.
wealth by royal commissions,
12Duffy, Stripping of theAltars, 4?6; for medieval
liturgy and mass,
lay devotion
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and participation,
Watson
came in the first generation
/ Wordplay,Ambivalence, & Anxiety
in "Hamlet"
479
of reform under Edward and again immediately
after
the accession of Elizabeth, a later generation was still reporting genuine mourning
for the destruction among the simple sort, a category that included many women.13
Hamlet, asmany critics have observed, is a play of maimed rights and altered
culture resonates in the allusions to Herod as
customs.14 In it, pre-Reformation
season
cock of the Christmas
mystery play character (3.2.12), the mythical
(1.1.139-45), Ophelia's song mentioning
pilgrimage badges (4.5.25), and Hamlet's
is forgot"' (3.2.122),
quotation of the ballad line, "For 0, for 0, the hobby-horse
referring to a banned parish game (and punning on a term for awhore).15 What
for the English in the age of Shakespeare, how
serious questions of rites, prayer, and the existence of purgatory
still was creating some uncertainty
ever, were more
and ghosts. Hamlet seems to reflect the loss of the Roman Catholic heritage "more
than any other Elizabethan masterpiece"; yet, for the use of ghosts and purgatory,
Shakespeare leads his contemporaries.16 Although not all of these losses are alluded
to directly, since some are hidden
in wordplay
and others in covert comparisons,
Hamlet is saturated with
allusions to varieties of religious practices. Even the many
expletives (most of them uttered by Hamlet or Polonius) constantly bring up mar
riage and the Eucharist; and in at least one case, "God's bodykins" (2.2.508), the
expletive is then played on in succeeding lines with echoes from prayers given
during the sacramentof Communion.17Even if theElizabethanlanguage,imbued
as it was with words used for both Catholic and Protestant theology and practice,
can be "entirely explicable as a linguistic phenomenon
and does not impose any
doctrinal consequences"; Shakespeare does problematize the rightsof some charac
ters to traditional rites.18Communion,
prayer, and last rites for the dying and the
prayer, and the cults of the saints and of the dead generally,
see his part l,"The
Structures
of Traditional
Religion."
13Duffy, Stripping of theAltars, 591. Haigh, "Church of England, Catholics, and People," 199,283n,
An Apologie orDefence ofourDayes (1589) on the reaction of women
and the uned
quotes Francis Trigge 's
in Duffy, Stripping of theAltars, 384?85, 403-4,
also suggest resistance among
ucated, and examples
women.
14See, for example, David Bevington, Action Is Eloquence: Shakespeare's Language of Gesture (Cam
Press, 1984), 146,174; Francis Fergusson, The Idea of aTheater; a Study
bridge, MA: Harvard University
ofTen Plays: The Art ofDrama in Changing Perspective (1949; repr., Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor,
1953), 139; Michael Neill, Issues ofDeath: Mortality and Identity in English Renaissance Tragedy (Oxford:
and True Rites andMaimed Rites: Anti-ritual
in Shakespeare and His Age, ed.
Clarendon,
1997), 300-304,
Linda Woodbridge
and Edward Berry (Urbana: University
of Illinois Press, 1992).
15See, for example, Duffy, Stripping of theAltars, 592; and Milward, Catholicism of Shakespeare's Plays,
see Naomi Conn Liebler, Shakespeare's Festive Tragedy: The Ritual
43. On nostalgia for the hobby-horse,
Foundations of Genre (New York: Routledge,
1995), 177-82.
in Purgatory
16Milward, Catholicism of Shakespeare's Plays, 46?47, and Stephen Greenblatt, Hamlet
Press, 2001), 156-57.
(Princeton: Princeton University
Christian Ritual and theWorld of Shakespeare's Tragedies (Lewisburg: Buck
17Herbert R. Coursenjr.,
nell University
Press; London: Associated University
Presses, 1976), 109,128.
cautions readers of
18Hunter, "Shakespeare and the Church," 26-27. Similarly, Judy Kronenfeld
texts to be aware that the same terms were often used by different sides and for different
Reformation
the Language ofReligion and Resistance
reasons; see Kronenfeld, King Lear and theNaked Truth: Rethinking
(Durham: Duke University
Press, 1998), 249.
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480
Sixteenth Century Journal XXXV/2
(2004)
dead are those most prominent
in verbal play in Hamlet, although marriage, sugges
tions of baptism, and references to traditions of sanctuary also are present.
First, Communion
and theMass stir up the ambivalence. Besides the expletives
on the Roman Mass
mass," 3.2.347,
final scene with
(the Second Clown's
"mass" of 5.1.51 and Polonius's "By the
two scenes parody the Mass: the dumb show and the
the chalice of wine. In both scenes, a vessel is elevated; in both,
for example),
poison replaces the symbolic blood of Christ.The
Protestants emptied ritual of any
sense of mystery
draining
and real presence
practices entirely of their power
but without
the sacred symbols and
to structure thought and response; therefore, the
dumb show, although still recognizable as parody to the audience, can be viewed as
Protestant parody of a rite now attributed to belief in the magic of transubstantiation
instead of serving merely
as a sign or mnemonic
device.19 As remembered
signs, the
dumb show and final scene evoke religious overtones of the Mass, but the dumb
show also commemorates
the taking of Hamlet's father in a garden, an act ofJudas
like treachery. In the final scene, the unction with which Laertes daubs his sword
(4.7.113) becomes both the last rite for, and the cause of, Hamlet's death; that is,
"As Laertes earlier said he was prepared to do, he and Claudius thus contrive away
to cut Hamlet's throat in the church," a place once accepted as a domain of sanctu
and
ary.20The play on union links the pearl in the cup both to Holy Communion
to the incestuous union of Gertrude and Claudius. Given this context, the sound
of the words, "And in the cup an union shall he throw" (5.2.210, italics mine), may
represent a play on the word communion.21The multiple implications of words in this
scene suggest that Claudius may take on the role ofAntichrist and that the "chalice
is like the gold cup borne by theWhore of Babylon"; or the parodic elements can
be compared to aBlack Mass or to amacabre anti-Communion, with first Claudius
as priest and then Hamlet functioning as the devil's priest.22 However, Claudius also
advocated by a few
may enact the idea of increased lay participation in Communion
reform groups, which tends to associate Claudius with aNew Religion
role, as do
his curtailing of mourning
rites and his reluctance to kneel in prayer.
Second, prayer, like Communion, was amatter of disunity among reformers.
Both
rites raised questions
kneeling,
or standing-which
the position of the worshiper's body-sitting,
also would concern actors in scenes of worship or
about
19EHzabeth Mazzola,77ie
Pathology of theEnglish Renaissance: Sacred Remains andHoly Ghosts, Stud
86 (Leiden: BriU, 1998), 3,108,121.
ies in the History of Christian Thought
20David Kaula, Hamlet and the Image of Both Churches," Studies in English Literature 24 (1984):
254. To the sacr?ege of Laertes's "To cut his throat i'th' church," Claudius
repHes, "No place indeed
sanctuarize. / Revenge
should murder
should have no bounds" (4.7.98-101). Violating
the rules of a
bout would also have been a form of profanation.
21
inHamlet that Hnks a cluster of words to suggest the sound of other words is exempH
Wordplay
New AUusion inHamlet?" Notes
fied by the "wit...
pun identified by David Roberts,"A
gifts"/Whitgift
and Queries 43.2 (June 1996): 157?58; and an ingenious
extracted by Ned
pun on "Shakespeare"
Lukacher from the Player's Speech; see Daemonic Figures: Shakespeare and theQuestion of Conscience (Ith
aca: CorneU University
Press, 1994), 134-35.
Christian Ritual,
154; and Roy Battenhouse,
22Kaula, "Hamlet and the Image," 254; Coursen,
"Hamlet's Evasions and Inversions," in Shakespeare's Christian Dimension, anAnthology of Commentary, ed.
Indiana University
Press, 1994), 400.
Roy Battenhouse
(Bloomington:
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Watson
/ Wordplay,Ambivalence, & Anxiety
in "Hamlet"
481
feasting. On a verbal level, the wordplay on preyer and prayer begins with the Ghost
accusing Gertrude of falling from angelic grace to preying on "garbage" (1.5.58),
moves
to an agitated Hamlet announcing
that he will "go pray" (1.5.136), and
comes together in the prayer scene with Claudius, where the man preyed upon as
garbage is about to be preyed upon while at prayer.23 Hamlet, however, has a ves
tigial sense of sanctuary, albeit displaced onto the act of prayer rather than inhering
in a physical place. Thus, anger is tempered by reluctance when he comes upon
in prayer, although Hamlet soon rationalizes his
kneeling unprotected
hesitation: he will not be the agent of sending a repentant soul to heaven when his
to purgatory. Hamlet's reaction suggests
father has been (apparently) condemned
lingering memories of the old religion and a failure to recognize the act of kneeling
Claudius
as unreliable evidence of prayer (another Calvinist complaint). Because Hamlet's
own feigned madness covers a deep "mystery," he perceives kneeling to be a sign of
some inherent benefit linked to the spiritual state. But Claudius represents a new
religious stance; kneeling comes with difficulty: "Bow, stubborn knees, and heart,
with strings of steel, / Be soft as sinews of the new-born babe" (3.3.70-71). Such
stubbornness about kneeling not only emphasizes the hardened heart of Claudius
but also may allude to concerns voiced by some more radical Puritans.24 Further
more, Claudius
prays alone, without
invoking any mediating saint or other inter
prayer, then, cannot succeed without
the appropriate
inward
disposition, but his "thoughts remain below" (3.3.97). This seeming act of prayer
halts the sword, which is stayed because of the boundaries placed by Hamlet on the
act of revenge.
cessor.25 His
the dying, for the burial of the corpse, and for the
Finally, mourning rites-for
prayers offered by those still living-form
another cluster of allusions tomajor Ref
ormation changes. For Hamlet, abandoning the past is not possible, but cut off from
the Denmark of his father and under pressure from the uncle/king
and mother/
queen, he can neither dissimulate effectively nor maintain themourning he believes
appropriate without the antic cloak of madness-going
against nature in a different
way. Like Horatio, however, Hamlet still finds some elements of the old religion
seductive (Horatio's "So have I heard and do in part believe it," 1.1.146) and thus
can see the ghost. Although the former king has been denied the last rites owed to
the dying, his spirit cries out not for prayer but for revenge. Significantly though,
the Prince
tells his friends, just after speaking to the Ghost, that he will "go pray"
for guidance in interpreting the nature of the apparition or for
(1.5.136)-whether
his father's salvation is not clear. Indeed, this line forms part of what Horatio calls
comments on the first two prey/pray passages; see "Shakespeare's Hamlet,"
23Stanley J. Kozikowski
Explicator 55 (1991): 126.
criticism of Puritan refusals to kneel during the reign of James I, see Lori Anne
24For Anglican
Ferrell, "Kneeling and the Body Politic," in Religion, Literature, and Politics in Post-Reformation England,
ed. Donna B. Hamilton
Strier (Cambridge: Cambridge
and Richard
1540-1688,
Press,
University
1996), 74-75.
on the Protestant nature of this prayer scene in an NEH
25Richard Strier commented
Summer
Seminar
at the University
of Chicago
in 1992.
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482
Sixteenth Century Journal XXXV/2
Hamlet's "wild and whirling words"
was deemed unacceptable
(2004)
(1.5.137), perhaps because prayer for the dead
by reformers. Ophelia's
references to prayer for her father
after his hurried burial also appear in the context of madness:
He
is gone, he is gone,
And we cast away moan.
God 'a'mercy on his soul.
And of all Christian souls, I pray God. God b'wi'ye.
(4.5.192-95)
Here,
the medieval
Protestant
objections
Danish
court's position
to customary mourning
accords with
the Elizabethan
one.
practice were based on its associa
tion with superstitions, especially purgatory and the belief that the living could
bargain by intercessional prayer with God to help the dead, but the reformers
found prayers for the dead one of the most difficult customs to eradicate.26 That
sermon of 1626 in
the issue lingered on only requires a look at a post-Easter
his
is
listeners that any "bargaine
betweene Christ and
which John Donne reminds
his Church," not us, and that "Prayer for the Dead ... is the Grand-mother Error,"
is the Mother
error, and indulgences her children.27 To reformers,
therefore, the dead need not be remembered or long mourned but simply left to
God; they were, according to Duffy, consigned to oblivion and "became as shad
purgatory
owy as the blanks in the stripped matrices of their gravestones."28 Perhaps partly
for this reason, the Roman Catholic Ghost insists, just before disappearing, that his
son remember him, and the young Hamlet promises to write it down in "the table
of my memory"
is now justified
(1.5.91, 95-98). The son's "particular" mourning
and removed from the taint of selfishness.
all institutional responses
Nevertheless,
to death-to
dying rites, to funerals,
and tomourning-represent
amajor site of Reformation
contention. Not by acci
dent, then, do the two opening scenes of Hamlet move from the Old King as ghost
to the New King "forbidding mourning."29 The sequence of kings not only marks
the moral passage from the "excellent," "loving," and "wholesome
brother," who
is
26Duffy, Stripping of theAltars, 577-78; and David Cressy,
and the Life-Cycle inTudor and Stuart England (Oxford: Oxford
discusses two superstitions relevant to Hamlet: that the soul of
of the body during the first thirty days after burial, a Hminal
Birth, Marriage, and Death: Ritual, Religion
Press, 1997), 398, 411. Cressy
University
the departed "st?l Hngered in the vicinity
situation requiring great ritual caution";
by a second service and funeral feast (398).
and that the end of this "month-mind" would be celebrated
indeed bring it closer to the wedding
feast of Claudius and Gertrude.
Such a second funeral feast would
For the theology and folklore of purgatory and its subsequent demoHtion by Protestants, see Greenblatt,
Hamlet in Purgatory.
demonstrates
the lack of bibHcal foundation
for the
27This sermon on resurrection
extensively
see sermon no. 6, in The Sermons ofJohn Donne, ed. Evelyn M.
of purgatory;
of CaHfornia Press, 1954), 7:168-73.
R. Potter (Berkeley: University
28Duffy, Stripping of theAltars, 494-95.
existence
George
Simpson
and
in 1611, appears to have
Forbidding Mourning,"
probably written
29John Donne's "AValediction:
taken this idea Hghtly; see The Complete English Poems, ed. A.J. Smith (New York: St. Martin's,
1971),
84,405.
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Watson
/ Wordplay,Ambivalence, &Anxiety
in "Hamlet"
483
to the carousing, satyrlike "bloat king" (1.2.139-40; 3.4.64-66),
"like Hyperion,"
but also reflects a broader series of changes inDenmark. In the first scene, Horatio's
two references to wandering spirits of the dead join the ancient past (portents of
to traditional Chris
doom and disaster at the death ofJulius Caesar, 1.1.106.6-18)
trace elements also prepare for the tragic deaths to
tian belief (1.1.130-45).These
come. Against
these ominous
views, Marcellus
a cock singing all night in the Christmas
the living. Morning
the folkloric belief in
superimposes
season to keep errant spirits from troubling
banishes mourning.
this lyric moment,
Claudius, along with his entire
court, enters and, seconded by Gertrude, begins to criticize Hamnlet for continuing
to display a "particular" and selfish mourning. Gertrude's brief speech on the death
Immediately
following
of fathers as "natural" (the irony of which probably removes from her any complic
ity in the murder) proclaims life a passage directly from "nature to eternity"
(1.2.73), effectively eliminating both purgatory and the efficacy of prayer to help
the dead. Claudius continues his rebuke of young Hamlet in Protestant fashion,
is not only "unmanly" but "incorrect to
asserting that this show of mourning
heaven" and "a fault to heaven, / A fault against the dead, a fault to nature, / To
the pattern of belief has made a dra
reason most absurd" (1.2.94-95, 101-3).Thus,
shift in theology from one scene to the next, although the hypocrisy of Clau
dius here, as in his attempt to pray, does not validate this shift. The compulsive
repetition offault, which puns on fall, hints that Claudius has caused the fall of his
brother from kingship and heaven, the falling off of Gertrude, and his own fall as a
matic
murdering
Cain.30
swings back: by returning the Ghost in the second night's
watch and by associating the old King Hamlet with traces of Roman Catholic prac
tice, Shakespeare generates a counterargument. When Hamlet, who had accepted
as traditional the burial of his father's "canonized bones," sees the Ghost clad in full
armor on the battlements of a place forging new weapons (shortly after hearing
cannon fire for the king's rouse), he immediately suspects something amiss: "Say,
why is this?Wherefore? What should we do?" (1.4.39). His father claims to be suf
But
the pendulum
fering in purgatorial fires because he did not receive the standard rites of a last con
fession followed by the Eucharist and extreme unction: "Cut off even in the
unaneled, / No reckoning
blossoms of my sin, / Unhouseled,
dis-appointed,
It is as though his failure to receive last rites caused the
made" (1.5.76-78).31
crusted skin, not as a symptom of poison but rather as a sign of sin. The reasoned
arguments of the day give way to doubts about new ways over old when the dark
ness of night again covers the land.
The truncated rites of King Hamlet, however, have set up a pattern. Although
there are theological reasons for the "maimed rites" for Ophelia as a probable sui
^Fault
also suggests
sexual sin; for "fall/fault/foutre"
as a "complex
Suffocating Mothers, 23-24.
31On these traditional rites of the dying, see Duffy, Stripping
see ibid., 466,474.
reduction of deathbed rites to Communion,
bilingual
of theAltars,
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pun,"
310-12;
see Adelman,
and on the
484
Sixteenth Century Journal XXXV/2
(2004)
cide, political reasons for a quiet and hurried funeral for the murdered Polonius,
and dynastic reasons for the precipitate and overly consanguineous marriage of
Claudius
to Queen
Gertrude,
the change in rites clearly suits the temperament
and
policies of Claudius.32 To Claudius, the issue is not just Hamlet's self-preoccupied
mourning:
traditional rites are rights, after all, and difficult for an insecure king to
control. Claudius interprets his nephew's persistence in wearing black as symbolic
that is all too visible to the entire court and subversive in its reminder of
the previous king. Claudius has a certain unexpected moral flexibility, and his speed
criticism
inmoving
from funeral tomarriage may suggest amore
zealous form of Protestant
ism, also reflected in the other curtailed rites in the tragedy. Like the reformers, he
has no desire to bargain with God, and he seems to embody Duffy's conclusion that
the Reformation
attack on the cult of the dead was more than a polemic
belief: it was an attempt to redefine the
of the human community, and, in an act of exorcism, to limit
against a "false" metaphysical
boundaries
the claims of the past, and the people
of the past, on the people
of the
present.33
As aweak king, Claudius will not risk permitting memories
of the past to set the
standards and policies of his present rule. Not until after Claudius's death can the
in the same context, although even Fortinbras
words rights and rites be mentioned
separates the two words by ten lines (5.2.334, 343) and does not knowingly pun.
in this kingdom" for himself
Ironically, Fortinbras claims "some rights of memory
and assigns "rites of war" to Hamlet (who has unwittingly
fought the battle for
Fortinbras), a further reversal of Hamlet's rights as heir (even if posthumously) and
Fortinbras's warlike activities.
If rites have a place in the actions and language of the play, the material furnish
ings of rehgious practice also have their place in stage properties and language. The
iconoclasm arising within the Reform movements deeply affected the material cul
ture of churches, and its aftermath of loss and replacement is embedded in the stag
ing of Hamlet. Traditionally, a richly furnished church had been a source of parish
and town pride and distinction; but once the churches were stripped of their accu
mulated material wealth, a neglect of decaying church buildings often set in.34When
reformers began to organize groups of citizens to help smash the altars and images
in 1521, then in England in
and remove the costly ornaments, first inWittenberg
the 1530s and again in 1547 after theMarian refittings, they hoped to convince the
laity that church architecture resided in the congregations of the faithful rather than
in physical buildings and that the altar of prayer should be the human heart rather
32For some of the questions raised by curtailed rites in works by Shakespeare and his contempo
raries, see essays in True Rites andMaimed Rites, ed.Woodbridge,and
Berry. Lacan, "Desire and the Inter
in the play, also observes
discussion of desire and mourning
pretation of Desire," 40, in a psychoanalytic
in Hamlet, one element is always present: the rites have been cut
that "in all the instances of mourning
in secret."
short and performed
33Duffy, Stripping of theAltars, 8.
34Collinson, "Elizabethan Church
and New
Religion,"
170; and Duffy,
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Stripping of theAltars, 502.
Watson
/ Wordplay,Ambivalence, & Anxiety
in "Hamlet"
485
than an elaborately carved piece of stonework.35 Only
gradually, and long after the
clearing out of churches and destruction of monastery
buildings, did the laity come
to accept the internalizing of their spiritual life, guided by sermons attacking popery
and likening the heart within a Christian to an altarwithin a temple.36
In Hamlet, altars become
a site of loss and replacement
signaled by wordplay
that goes beyond the secularized and internalized heart (Hamlet's punning "heart's
appear no sacred
core").37 On the stage representing Shakespeare's Denmark
as sites of sanctuary, prayer, or
images and no altars-altars are not even mentioned
of the tragedy's use of theVergilian epic to heighten its serious
ness, the altar as sanctuary would have yielded added resonance for students of the
classics. The Aeneid, one of the sources of the First Player's Speech, refers a number
of times to the horror of a killing before a family altar or a temple altar.38Yet, in
worship. Because
Hamlet, the player's speech ofAeneas
less; and inMarlowe's
to Dido
describing
Dido, Queen of Carthage, to which
the death of Priam is altar
Shakespeare was deeply
indebted, only one brief reference to "Jove's altar" appears.39 Shakespeare's First
Player breaks off abruptly as the sword of Pyrrhus pauses, then continues, in its
descent on the helpless King Priam, followed by the poet's attack on "strumpet For
tune" and Hecuba's clamorous entrance. In the Aeneid, however, the description of
Priam's death begins and ends at the palace altar (2.512-54) in a vivid scene prob
TheVergilian taleof Dido has
ablymemorized bymany English schoolchildren.40
a further contextual link to altars:Dido's husband Sichaeus, murdered at the altar
by her own brother, came to her as a ghost to warn her to flee King Pygmalion's
incestuous advances (1.34068).41
She did, and in the city she founded, Carthage,
hears Aeneas tell of the fall of Troy, the tale retold by Harnlet and the First Player.
Tragically, the elements of a husband's murder reported by a ghost and awarning
about incest have been relayed to Hamlet, not to Gertrude, who remains unaware
and unknowing.
on the Continent,
see Euan Cameron, The European Reformation (Oxford: Clar
1991), 249-51; and for England, see Duffy, Stripping of theAltars, 381,451,455-58.
trea
theological
preached such a sermon based on Matt. 6:1 (Sermons, 9.175-76);
36John Donne
and emblem
tises by authors such as Flacius IUyricus and Joseph HaU, poets such as George Herbert,
books also took up the analogy, often playing on the Latin word for heart, or cor, see Barbara Kiefer
Lewalski, Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric (Princeton: Princeton University
35For iconoclasm
endon,
Press, 1979), 81,103,135-36,193-96,312.
37The heart is a site of friendship rather than prayer, as Hamlet pointedly
speUs out to Horatio,
on the Latin word for heart, cor:"In my heart's core, ay, inmy heart of hearts" (3.2.66).
playing
C. J. Putnam points out, similar deaths at altars also occur in Seneca's tragedies as a
38As Michael
result offuror and madness; see Putnam, Virgil's Aeneid: Interpretation and Influence (Chapel Hill: University
of North
CaroHna Press, 1995), 260,270-72.
Hears Marlowe;
Shakespeare Reads Virg?," Renaissance and Reformation 18,
39James Black,"Hamlet
no. 4 (1994): 19; Christopher Marlowe, The Life ofMarlowe and The Tragedy ofDido Queen of Carthage, ed.
S.Miola,
C. F.Tucker Brooke
1966), 159; and Robert
(New York: Gordian,
"Verg? in Shakespeare:
to Imitation," in Vergil: The Classical Heritage, ed. Craig KaUendorf
From AUusion
(New York: Garland,
1993), 2:282-83.
40See Virgil: Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid, trans. H. Rushton
Fairclough, rev. ed., 2 vols. (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University
Press, 1994), 1:328-31.
41
Virgil: Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid, 1:264?67.
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486
Sixteenth CenturyJournal
XXXV/2
(2004)
Shakespeare, perhaps deliberately, stresses the absence of altars by stopping
player's speech just before he would
Although
Elizabethan
have described
the
the murdered Priam by his altar.
authorities had replaced altars with Communion
tables, the
term altar (or auter) did not disappear from the language of the laity, so neither its
use as a papist term nor its association with pagan antiquity would have been ques
tioned. Besides destroying altars, Reformation
authorities had ordered parish
churches to sell or recycle their rich altarcloths, images, plate, chalices, and other
items associated with Roman Catholicism.42 Placing any of these as Christian arti
facts on a secular stage would have been unacceptable to prelates at the end of Eliz
abeth's reign and after.What Shakespeare does is to provide altar replacements
can now look to the table,
throughout the play, punning on their connections.We
the arras, the bed (mentioned but not present on stage), and a few of the other trap
pings for these replacements.
In Elsinore, these objects have been secularized. The table, as the official altar
replacement, is the most obvious substitution. Because it is needed in the final scene
to hold the cups of wine and probably in Gertrude's closet, a table may have been
visible, though pushed to one side of the stage, through all five acts. Shakespeare
plays on the word
table throughout, using it formemory
tables,writing
tables, tables
of reckoning, and places of eating and feasting.The proximity of Hamlet's reference
to the Ghost's commandment and his writing this down in his tables may suggest an
The table joins the rites of
allusion to the tablets of the Ten Commandments.43
be at
funeral and wedding, and Ophelia in madness gives a belated grace-"God
could also be a further link to her father's being
your table" (4.5.43)-which
described by Hamlet as a feast or "diet" of worms
(4.3.21-22),
playing on the
Imperial Diet held inWorms, Germany, in 1521 to condemn Martin Luther's writ
ings.44 Such tables are, in Hamlet, a scene of boisterous activity: the king's rouse
(1.4.9); the past antics ofYorick that "set the table aroar" (5.1.176), and
death in the final scene. On this final table, the chalice has been replaced
ing goblet for poisoned, not blessed, wine (but with eucharistic and
overtones).The union in the cup on this table may also allude to papists
the Protestant communion
the table of
by a drink
apocalyptic
denigrating
table as an "oyster table."45
42See Duffy, Stripping of theAltars, 584?87. As with rites, such iconoclasm was not thoroughgoing;
see Kenneth Gross, Spenserian Poetics: Idolatry, Iconoclasm, and Magic
Press,
(Ithaca: Cornell University
1985), 11.
43The term commandment occurs again in the context of Hamlet's rewriting of the sealed document,
seeMarjorie
tells the ambassador from England, was not Claudius's exact commandment;
which, Horatio
Garber, Shakespeare's Ghost Writers: Literature as Uncanny Causality (NewYork: Methuen,
1987), 149?53.
in Hamlets
of politic worms" and
44The allusion is clearly made
phrases "a certain convocation
as "your only emperor for diet"; for a discussion of its implications, seeWaddington,
"Luth
the worm
eran Hamlet," 27-32.
of Anglicanism,"
in Conformity and Ortho
and the Myth
45Nicholas Tyacke, "Lancelot Andrewes
ed. Peter Lake and Michael Questier
(Woodbridge: Boydell,
doxy in the English Church, c. 1560-1660,
2000),
16; and John Foxe, The Acts andMonuments
ofJohn Foxe
the "oyster boards."
107, also mentions
(New York: AMS,
Staging Reform,
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1965): 7.536. Diehl,
Watson
/ Wordplay,Ambivalence, & Anxiety
in "Hamlet"
487
second altar replacement is the arras.Again, in Hamlet, the arras probably
in place during the entire performance in the space between the stage
doors, either hanging out a few feet from a blank wall or covering a small alcove,
or discovery space.46 In the pre-Reformation
church, textile hangings and altar
The
remained
cloths provided both pictures and an impression of magnificence.
Gertrude's closet,
furnished with painted portraits and an arras, resembles a secular version of a private
chapel. Thus,
the portraits of the two kings, which Hamnlet employs
images of good and evil, virtue
moral
lesson, represent secularized
There
are no altarcloths; but it is striking that wall hangings
to deliver a
and vice.47
are used twice in the
play to conceal spies who hope to catch the Prince confessing his inmost secrets,
and each arras scene is announced in advance, aswell (2.2.165 and 3.3.28). In both
arras scenes, Polonius is behind the hanging. These trappings are used for entrap
ment (and ironically entrap the "rat" Polonius instead); rather than aid prayer, the
tapestries conceal the preyers from their prey.48
The two arras scenes form a frame around the scenes of the players and of
Claudius's prayer, both of these enacted in places devoid of altars. If the arras used
in early performances of Hamlet had represented a classical scene
and the Trojan
a tapestry would have added visu
War cycle was a popular tapestry subject-such
ally amore obvious classical context for the Player's Speech, for the prayer scene,
and for Gertrude's closet.49 Even without a visual prompting, what can be teased
out is the hidden pun: the arras replaces the ara, or altar. In those Aeneid (and Sen
ecan) passages in which
someone
the object of a preposition,
ismurdered at an altar, the Latin word is usually
the insistent phrases ad aras (Pyrrhus killing
yielding
et al., "A Stage for Shakespeare," in
46Bevington, Action Is Eloquence, 115-16; C.Walter Hodges
Staging Shakespeare: Seminars on Production Problems, ed. Glenn Loney (New York: Garland, 1990), 166
at the Globe," Theatre Notebook 53 (1999): 8-18; and Tim Fitzpatrick
67; Andrew Gurr, "Stage Doors
or Problematic
and Wendy Millyard,
and Discoveries:
Evidence
"Hangings, Doors,
Conflicting
Theatre Notebook 54 (2000): 2?23. For discovery
spaces and their similarities to tomb
Assumptions?"
The Archaeology of Shakespeare: The Material Legacy of Shakespeare's Theatre
sculpture, see Jean Wilson,
(Stroud: Sutton, 1995), 86-93.
of the Closet Scene in Ham
47Paul Hamill, "Death's Lively Image: The Emblematic
Significance
let,"Texas Studies in Literature and Language 16 (1974): 249.
into its tap
48There are possible rat puns and associations both with a town mark of Arras woven
term for a counselor; see Ian Gadd, "The Rat and Hamlet's Arras," Notes
estries and with the German
and Queries 242, n.s. 44 (March 1997): 61-62; and the word rat in vol. 8 of Jacob Grimm andWilhelm
Grimm, Deutsches W?rterbuch (Leipzig: Hirzel,
1893), esp. cols. 170-72. A ratwas also an answer to a
riddle or enigma (r?tset), and Hamlet
riddles about the location of Polonius's body (col. 169).The OED
does not give these usages.
a
49Jerry Brotton has also noted the possibility of Gertrude's arras as representation of the Trojan
see "Ways of
of imperial power and sexual violence";
although he is looking at the "conflation
(New York: Routledge,
2002),
Seeing Hamlet," in "Hamlet": New Critical Essays, ed. Arthur F. Kinney
172. None
of the contemporary
references to arrases on stages gives any helpful description. Old tap
commoners were purchasing
estries were very expensive, but even well-off
them by the end of the six
War,
teenth century; see Mary E. Hazard, Elizabethan Silent Language (Lincoln: University
of Nebraska Press,
2000), 78. For inventories of some of the largest collections of arras and tapestry, see Ancient Inventories
(London,
of Furniture, Pictures, Tapestry, Plate, etc...., ed. and comp. James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps
sTapestry Collection,"
"Cardinal Wolsey
1854), esp. 142-46
(Kenilworth Castle); and Tom Campbell,
s collection of more than six hundred tapestries
ofWolsey
Antiquaries Journal 76 (1996): 73-137. Much
was dispersed after his fall from power; see Campbell, "Wolsey sTapestry," 95,115.
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488
Sixteenth Century Journal XXXV/2
Priam, 2.663, and Orestes
(2004)
killing Pyrrhus, 3.332), per aras (Priam's death, 2.501),
and ante aras (the murder of Dido's husband, 1.349).50 Latin puns, such as cor/core!
heart and mater/matter/mother, are not unknown in Shakespeare, especially in Hamlet,
so audiences with
a good grammar school education might
play on aras/arras.51 Hamlet
have caught the word
has not killed the king ad aras:he has killed the king's
stand-in at the arras, the altar's replacement.
Gertrude's arras not only hnks her to the situation of Dido, threatened with an
incestuous marriage to the brother who killed her wealthy husband, but it also sug
gests another passage from the Aeneid. After Aeneas flees the royal palace where
slaughtered, he passes the temple ofVesta, where he spots Helen
Priam has been
hiding among the altars: "illa ... abdiderat sese atque aris invisa sedebat" ("she ...
had hidden herself and was a crouching, hateful thing, by the altars," 2.571, 574).
In amad rage at Helen
rushes toward Helen,
for causing so many Trojans to be put to the sword, Aeneas
but he is suddenly
confronted
by his mother, Venus, who
chides his wrath and reminds him of his duty to rescue his family:
nate, quis indomitas tantus dolor excitat iras?
quid furis? aut quonam nostri tibi cura recessit?
(2.594-95)
[My son, what
Why
resentment
this rage? or whither
thus stirs thy ungovernable wrath?
has thy care for me fled?]52
Gertrude, in the closet scene, collapses Helen andVenus, the culpable woman and
the mother/goddess
reprehending her son: "What have I done, that thou dar'st
wag thy tongue / In noise so rude against me?" (3.4.38-39). Hamlet would not
kill his mother, but his language echoes that violent scene when he vows to "speak
daggers to her, but use none" (3.2.366), "words like daggers" that penetrate Ger
trude's conscience
(3.4.85). Helen hiding among the altars is replaced by Polonius
hiding behind an arras.Vergil's manifestVenus, however, also suggests the ghost of
Hamlet's father because Venus reminds her son that Troy's fall is not Helen's fault,
but the work of Greek-supporting
gods, and that Aeneas must leave without
harming her. In Hamlet, the ghost of King Hamlet has already advised his son not
to harm his mother but to let heaven judge her (1.5.86). Aeneas obeys his mother,
50See Virgil: Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid, 1:264, 326, 338, 370. Trojans also k?l ItaHans at an altar: aris
(12.292) and ab ara (12.298); see also 2:318. For "Ara, huius zrze.An aulter"Thomas Cooper provides a
long Hst of brief examples, including several defined in terms of sanctuary; see Cooper, Thesaurus Linguae
Romanae et Britannicae (1578; repr., H?desheim:
Olms, 1975).
51For examples of English/Latin
puns, see respectively mater/matter, usus/uses, larva (grub)/larva
(Chicago:
(ghost or mask), in Patricia Parker, Shakespeare from theMargins: Language, Culture, Context
Press, 1996), 262?63;WilHam
Kerrigan, Hamlet's Perfection (Baltimore: Johns Hop
Chicago University
of Chi
and
Kenneth
Noise
kins University
Gross, Shakespeare's
Press, 1994), 45;
(Chicago: University
cago Press, 2001), 221n50.
52
Virgil: Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid,
1:332?35.
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Watson
that night on the long voyage
embarking
489
obeys his father-and
to Italy; Hamlet
forth that night on a ship bound
stepfather-setting
in "Hamlet"
/ Wordplay,Ambivalence, &Anxiety
for England.
The final altar replacement in Hamlet is the bed, namely, the King's bed. Again,
there is a pun on ara,but this piece of furniture in Shakespeare's treatment plays on
a Latin-Latin pun that surfaces in Protestant polemics: ara/hara, or altar/pigsty. Part
of the iconoclastic
desacralization
of ritual objects was putting
associated with
the "swinish" drunken
for pigs-and
bage"-food
Therefore, Hamlet
more
of Danes
behavior
(1.4.19), with
bed of Claudius
and Gertrude
nasty sty" (3.4.84). The ara/hara pun also contrasts the heavenly
earthly pigsties, as in the medieval
(Altar) with
circulated
in a number of manuscripts.54
Not
"gar
the "rotten" state of Denmark.
generally with
refers to the marriage
them to base uses,
stoup as a pig trough.53
pigs. The "bloat king" is
as, for example, a former priest recycling a holy-water
Demonizing
Claudius also implies his association with
as "the
constellation Ara
Latin verse comedy Babio, which
only was King Hamlet
aHyperion
(Apollo), but his "celestial bed" hints at the heavenly constellation Ara, the Altar,
while his replacement, Claudius, an earthy clod, corrupts "a radiant angel" with
"garbage" (1.5.55-57). Gertrude has replaced her original altar vows by an unholy
bed of animal passion, according to her son, although he makes clear that the bed
is Claudius's rather than hers and can thus be avoided (3.4.150, 166). The change
in beds, alluding to marriage
with
rites, also parodies the changing
religious culture, but
overtones of political succession.
Verbal play in Hamlet, then, flags the complex
the play world
replacements,
shifts and changes within both
and Shakespeare's world, because, even though the puns offer
they allow veiled and sometimes contested ideas to coexist with cur
religious overtones of punned words alluding to ritual
and sacred objects, lacking as they are in fixed significations within the play, there
fore, do not yield a reformation allegory. Even if we agree that "King Hamlet was
a Catholic" and that Claudius and Gertrude show some Protestant characteristics,
and
what do we make of Hamlet's apparent shift from associations withWittenberg,
hence Lutheranism, to a more Calvinist acceptance of providence?55 Hamlet has
changed after his sea voyage, but Horatio has aswell: while Hamlet's ambiguous last
words play on "rest" in amanner skeptical about any torments to come, Horatio
rently accepted ones. The
philosopher skeptical about ghosts and old religious
as the one to minister to the nation. In the last scene, it is
evolves from the university
practices and emerges
Horatio who
echoes words from the old Roman
Requiem
Mass when
he calls on
context, Francis Clark quotes from John
53Duffy, Stripping of theAltars, 585. Also in aReformation
sunt harae"; see Clark, Eucharistie Sacrifice and Reformation, 2nd ed. (1967; repr.,
ab \J\mis:"Araefactae
Devon: Augustine,
1980), 188.
Literature 1066-1422
54A. G. Rigg, A History ofNeo-Latin
(Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1992), 113-14. Several ofThomas Cooper's many examples of ara refer to the celestial ara; for hara
as a "Swinnes stie" only a few examples are given.
55Anthony Low, "Hamlet and the Ghost of Purgatory: Intimations of KilHng the Father," English
on Luther himself, seeWad
Literary Renaissance 29 (1999): 453. On the Hamlet who may be modeled
dington,
"Lutheran Hamlet,"
27-42;
and Sohmer,
Shakespeare's Mystery
Play, 240?42.
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All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
490
Sixteenth CenturyJournal
XXXV/2
(2004)
"flights of angels" (5.2.303) to take Hamlet's soul, so perhaps the end of the reign
the dead,
response to remembering
of Claudius will permit a more moderate
beginning with the military rites for Hamlet.56
On this stage, however, there are many forms of change taking place that are
not entirely
separable from the religious
residual culture represented by Hamlet
anxieties about emergent
fluctuations.
as well
For example,
a patriarchal
as former King Hamnlet projects
its
has taken action
to
cultural forces onto Gertrude, who
Characters are altered, even if the
avoid the sexual deprivation of widowhood.57
reach beyond fictional sons and
issues
may
not
The
is
altared.
patriarchal
stage
to
lingering conflicts between the old
fathers, if the intensity of Hamnlet's reactions
religions reflects the playwright's own troubled negotiations with a
recusant father, perhaps already dead or dying when the play was first written.
all the changes suggesting religion, family, and culture take place in a
Moreover,
King Hamlet's story adapted by Hamlet for the
context of altered stories-from
players, to Gertrude's account of the death of Polonius (and perhaps the drowning
and the new
to the future story to be delivered by Horatio, and above all to the story
himself adapted by Shakespeare from sources.There are, in addition, the
classical subtexts adapted fromVergil's and Marlowe's fall ofTroy and the suppressed
story of purgatory and its ghostly representatives, perhaps an Old Church fictional
of Ophelia),
of Hamlet
subtext for the early scenes.58
Thus, it is not the specific theology but the way inwhich
change is negotiated
thatmatters in Hamlet. Prince Hamlet must negotiate between the old and the new
in many ways, religion being only one of them, and verbal playfulness is a part of
this back-and-forth movement. Shakespeare deftly suggests a number of religious
positions without really endorsing any of them; yet what is not clear iswhether sec
ularization is being embraced or questioned in the play. In the urban spaces outside
the playhouses, secular ritual, decorative structures, and national myths shaped Lon
While the religiousestablishment'siconoclasmwas
don's open-air ceremonials.59
being countered by the civic establishment's determined secularization of ritual, the
stage served as an unofficial and unsanctioned site for the same process.The move
ment from Roman Catholic religious spectacle to Elizabethan theatrical spectacle
was another form of iconoclastic displacement necessary to the effective function
ing of Protestant religious practice, which also resembles the shifts and suppressions
56M?ward, Catholicism of Shakespeare's Plays, 45; and Roland Mushat Frye, Shakespeare and Christian
Doctrine (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1963), 135?36, who notes, however, that echoes of this
of a number of reformers.
prayer also occur in the writings
in the Light of Ideas on Remar
Most Pernicious Woman': Gertrude
57See Akiko Kusunoki,"'Oh
(New York: AMS,
England," in Hamlet andJapan, ed.Yoshiko U?no
riage in Early Seventeenth-Century
1995), 171,181.
58For purgatory as subtext, see Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory, 1,199.
it a sacred space; see
civic ceremonies made
59By the end of the sixteenth century, London's
in The Theatrical City: Culture, Theatre, and Politics in London,
"Of Sites and Rites,"
Lawrence Manley,
1576-1649
Press, 1995), 40.
(Cambridge: Cambridge University
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Watson
/ Wordplay,Ambivalence, &Anxiety
in "Hamlet"
491
suggested by Hamlet's puns.60 Staging truncated ritual and altar substitutes as aural
and visual reminders of changes in England both supports the Protestant cause and
at the same time arouses anxieties about loss, adding to dramatic tension. Critics
who have compared Shakespeare's practices with those of his contemporaries, how
ever, find some significant differences: Shakespeare endorses the theatrical appro
priateness of ghosts on stage more than other playwrights do; and, even as he denies
full rituals to his characters, Shakespeare provides his plays with gestures of ceremo
nial closure no longer present in works of other playwrights.61 Moreover, the sug
gestive sounds of puns and sights of stage properties linked to wordplay demonstrate
an author willing to give up old beliefs but unwilling to drop old meanings: signi
fication brings past and present together as theater, and denying the past is impos
sible, just aswe cannot deny the shadows of our parents. If this makes Shakespeare
an antiquarian-as
make him-then
in fact many of the allusions to old customs in Hamlet seem to
he is playing to a trace of nostalgia deep within his audience.
Thus, Stephen Greenblatt
describes
the appetite for a middle
place for souls' lin
gering not only into King Hamlet's purgatory but into a cult of the dead that lives
on with the play.62 The power of the past to continue signifying, even when the
to suppress the old meanings, works to force
present draws on counterpowers
of change, loss, and substitution. In Hamlet, the verbal replace
acknowledgment
ments of punning aremirrored by the stage furnishings of arras, cup, table, and bed
from Old King toNew King to conquer
that replace altars, and by the movement
all
of
which
ing Fortinbras,
might suggest to aTudor audience that the danger of
yet another shift in religion remains at the end of Elizabeth's reign and in the early
years of the Stuart succession.
"The Idolatrous Eye: Iconoclasm, Anti
Staging Reform, 64?65; and Michael O'Connell,
and the Image of the Elizabethan Theater," ELH 52 (1985): 299.
in Shakes
in Purgatory, 200; and Thomas M. Greene, "Ceremonial Closure
61Greenblatt, Hamlet
peare's Plays," in Perspectives on Early Modern andModern Intellectual History: Essays inHonor ofNancy S.
60Diehl,
Theatricalism,
Struever, ed. Joseph Marino
2000), 215.
62Greenblatt, Hamlet
and Melinda
W
Schlitt
(Rochester,
NY: University
in Purgatory, 256-57.
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All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
of Rochester
Press,