Shakespeare the Secret Catholic?

To be (Catholic) or not to be (Catholic)....

http://publicvigil.blogspot.com/2010/10/hidden-catholic-meaning-of-hamlet.html

It gets silly in the middle, but makes a good point about Claudius/Henry and Gertrude/Catherine parallels.

Here are some selections from a more scholarly article, called "Hamlet and the Reformation: The Prince of Denmark as 'Young Man Luther'" by Edward T. Oakes: (emphasis is mine)

"The central problem of the play, as was recognized almost upon its first appearance on stage, centers on why Hamlet hesitates in following out his father’s ghostly demand to avenge his death, quite in violation of the conventions of all other revenge tragedies. Interpretations explaining this indecision have ranged all over the map, but  only recently have critics come to recognize that Hamlet’s hesitation is first and primarily a theological hesitation. Strangely, this insight has been late in coming, even though Shakespeare peppered his play with hints and indications that he meant Hamlet to be a commentary on the Reformation; not least of course is his making the prince study in Wittenberg, of all places, when he hears of his father’s death and his mother’s hasty marriage. That geographical hint, however, was largely ignored until late in the twentieth century." (p.57-58)

"Recent criticism has come to reject these personality-driven approaches, whether Romantic or Freudian, and instead chooses to look at the historical setting of the play in order to see Hamlet’s conflict as essentially theological. To be sure, Eliot had already signaled a dissatisfaction with all Romantic interpretations of the play, but even he failed to notice what Paul Cantor sees as the most obvious setting for the tragedy: “It is remarkable how many of the complications of Hamlet’s situation can be traced to the impact of his belief in an afterlife has on his thinking. " (p.59)

"But why is Hamlet so uncertain? Cantor’s interpretation consistently places the play in the context of the Renaissance, that unique blend of classical Greek and Roman cultural norms within the setting of the Catholic religion. But, with rare exceptions, Renaissance artists displayed no hesitation about the truth of the Catholic account of the afterlife, as Dante’s Divine Comedy and Michelangelo’s frescos in the Sistine Chapel irrefutably show. Nothing in Shakespeare’s play gives any indication that Hamlet is a skeptic in the Hobbesian or Humean mode but rather is a Christian of a peculiar type: one torn between two rival versions of Christian eschatology, Catholic and Lutheran."(p.61)


This uncertainty is not only the center of the play, the very motor that explains all of Hamlet’s tormented ambivalence, it was also the reason that religious strife in Elizabethan England remained so chronic and unresolved, even to our present times. “Hamlet is a play of contagious, almost universal self-estrangement,” says Greenblatt, a theme Shakespeare signals in the opening scene of the play: “Say what, is Horatio there?” asks Bernardo on the castle walls at midnight, to which Horatio responds, “A piece of him” (1.1.21–22). This was Europe in 1600: in pieces, with all hopes of union and unity forever gone, lost in the interminable and irresolvable debates over purgatory, merit, indulgences, finding favor with God, Church authority versus the authority of the Bible."

“Protestants sometimes wrote as if the whole doctrine of Purgatory were a stage set, a will-o’the-wisp, a filthy spiderweb they could simply sweep away,” Greenblatt writes. But within a few years, the Puritans among them tried to abolish the stage as well, just as they had already dispatched the doctrine of purgatory as a poet’s fable. Terminology of the stage often referred to the ceiling or canopy as “heaven” and the understage as “hell.” The stage was earth; but as we saw with Prospero’s epilogue, also a kind of purgatory. “Does this mean that Shakespeare was participating in a secularization process, one in which the theater offers a disenchanted version of what the cult of Purgatory once offered?” Greenblatt asks. “Perhaps. But the palpable effect is something like the reverse: Hamlet immeasurably intensifies a sense of the weirdness of the theater, its proximity to certain experiences that had been organized and exploited by religious institutions and rituals.”³⁶ Here perhaps can be located the ultimate import of Shakespeare’s view of the Reformation: the uncertainties it introduced over purgatory are but a reflection of a more general dread of something after death" (p.72-73)