Hymn at Cock-Crow

I. HYMN AT COCK-CROW by Saint Prudentius

Awake! the shining day is born!

The herald cock proclaims the morn:

And Christ, the soul's Awakener, cries,

Bidding us back to life arise.

Away the sluggard's bed! away

The slumber of the soul's decay!

Ye chaste and just and temperate,

Watch! I am standing at the gate.

After the sun hath risen red

'Tis late for men to scorn their bed,

Unless a portion of the night

They seize for labours of the light.

Mark ye, what time the dawn draws nigh,

How 'neath the eaves the swallows cry?

Know that by true similitude

Their notes our Judge's voice prelude.

When hid by shades of dark malign

On beds of softness we recline,

They call us forth with music clear

Warning us that the day is near.

When breezes bright of orient morn

With rosy hues the heavens adorn,

They cheer with hope of gladdening light

The hearts that spend in toil their might.

Though sleep be but a passing guest

'Tis type of death's perpetual rest:

Our sins are as a ghastly night,

And seal with slumbers deep our sight.

But from the wide roof of the sky

Christ's voice peals forth with urgent cry,

Calling our sleep-bound hearts to rise

And greet the dawn with wakeful eyes.

He bids us fear lest sensual ease

Unto life's end the spirit seize

And in the tomb of shame us bind,

Till we are to the true light blind.

'Tis said that baleful spirits roam

Abroad beneath the dark's vast dome;

But, when the cock crows, take their flight

Sudden dispersed in sore affright.

For the foul votaries of the night

Abhor the coming of the light,

And shamed before salvation's grace

The hosts of darkness hide their face.

They know the cock doth prophesy

Of Hope's long-promised morning sky,

When comes the Majesty Divine

Upon awakened worlds to shine.

The Lord to Peter once foretold

What meaning that shrill strain should hold,

How he before cock-crow would lie

And thrice his Master dear deny.

For 'tis a law that sin is done

Before the herald of the sun

To humankind the dawn proclaims

And with his cry the sinner shames.

Then wept he bitter tears aghast

That from his lips the words had passed,

Though guileless he his soul possessed

And faith still reigned within his breast.

Nor ever reckless word he said

Thereafter, by his tongue betrayed,

But at the cock's familiar cry

Humbled he turned from vanity.

Therefore it is we hold to-day

That, as the world in stillness lay,

What hour the cock doth greet the skies,

Christ from deep Hades did arise.

Lo! then the bands of death were burst,

Shattered the sway of hell accurst:

Then did the Day's superior might

Swiftly dispel the hosts of Night.

Now let base deeds to silence fall,

Black thoughts be stilled beyond recall:

Now let sin's opiate spell retire

To that deep sleep it doth inspire.

For all the hours that still remain

Until the dark his goal attain,

Alert for duty's stern command

Let every soul a sentry stand.

With sober prayer on Jesus call;

Let tears with our strong crying fall;

Sleep cannot on the pure soul steal

That supplicates with fervent zeal.

Too long did dull oblivion cloud

Our motions and our senses shroud:

Lulled by her numbing touch, we stray

In dreamland's ineffectual way.

Bound by the dazzling world's soft chain

'Tis false and fleeting gauds we gain,

Like those who in deep slumbers lie:--

Let us awake! the truth is nigh.

Gold, honours, pleasure, wealth and ease,

And all the joys that mortals please,

Joys with a fatal glamour fraught--

When morning comes, lo! all are nought.

But thou, O Christ, put sleep to flight

And break the iron bands of night,

Free us from burden of past sin

And shed Thy morning rays within.

Old Jepthah

Painting of Jepthah, John Everett Millais, 1867

Jepthah asked God to bring him victory over his enemies, the Ammonites. In return, he vowed that "whoever comes forth from the doors of my house to meet me, when I return victorious from the Ammonites, shall be the LORD's, and I will offer him up as a burnt offering. (Judges 11:30-31) When he returns home victorious, his only child, a virgin daughter, runs out of the house to meet him. 
"And when he saw her, he rent his clothes, and said, 'Alas, my daughter! you have brought me very low and you have become the cause of great trouble for me, for I have opened my mouth to the LORD, and I cannot take back my vow."(11:35)
His daughter tells him that he must do whatever he has promised to God, but first she asks, " 'Let me alone two months, that I may go and wander on the mountains, and bewail my virginity, I and my companions.'
  

The Lament of Jepthah's Daughter, George Elgar Hicks, 1871

"And at the end of two months, she returned to her father, who did with her according to his vow which he had made. She had never known a man. And it became a custom in Israel that the daughters of Israel went year by year to lament the daughter of Jephthah the Gileadite four days in the year." (11: 37-40)

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)