Hamlet Among Protestants and Catholics

Most readers and viewers of Hamlet take Hamlet’s most famous soliloquy as a meditation on suicide.  In Hamlet, Protestantism, and the Mourning of Contingency, John E. Curran, Associate Professor of English at Marquette University, argues there are bigger things at work. Hamlet is opposing two ontologies, religious universes, moralities.

The first Curran labels “the Be.” The Be is the realm of predetermined fixity, without freedom, choice or contingency. It is an either/or, zero-sum world where every divine initiative must be at the expense of human merit, where signs and things stand in antagonistic opposition rather than seeking reconciliation. The Be is static, atemporal, a world within which human action is meaningless. In the Be, things stay what they are. The Be is cold, logical, technical, empty. The Be is a Protestant world.

On the other side of the great ugly ditch is “the Not to be,” which is everything the Be is not. It is a world of both-and, a world of real contingency and freedom, a world where grace and merit, sign and thing, live together in merry fellowship. Human action makes sense, and makes a difference, in the Not to be, because the Not to be is dynamic and temporal. In the Not to be, anything can happen, even bread becoming flesh. The Not to be is warm, moist, organic, teeming. The Not to be is Catholic.

Hamlet’s dilemma, according to Curran’s interpretation, is that of a man of Catholic sensibilities and aspirations who finds himself stuck in a Protestant world. In his heart, he is a man of the Not to be who wants to breathe free of the stifling stagnant air of Geneva or Wittenberg; but he learns, with growing frustration, that he lives in the Be. By the beginning of Act 5, he is resigned to the fact that the Not to be is not to be. After that, there is nothing more to say. Submitting to the Be leaves us speechless and dehumanized. The rest is silence.

In this context, Curran suggests, we can see what Hamlet is actually saying about suicide. To endure the slings and arrows is to submit to the Be, a course that Hamlet considers the least noble option. The nobler option is to insist on the dignity of human choice, perhaps through self-slaughter: “To commit suicide would be to alter all the conditions of Hamlet’s life, hateful conditions that have been imposed on him . . . He wants to be in what is now not in existence; musing on the availability of suicide lets him feel that he can have access to that world of real possibility” (p. 29). But the dagger falls. Sicklied o’er by thoughts of the Be, we are cowards all. Later, Hamlet wants to enact a unique revenge that does not fall into the typical pattern of bloodshed, but in the Protestant world of determined fixities, he can only be Hamlet. The Be is a world of the Same, where every revenge is like every other.

Curran’s book is filled with footnotes to both secondary literature on Hamlet and an abundance of primary and secondary literature on Elizabethan theology. He has read a lot, but despite the genuine erudition, Curran is no theologian. His portrayals of Catholic and Protestant “ontologies” amount to caricatures. He knows a few things about Protestant and Catholic theology, and extrapolates from those ideas to conclusions about what Protestants and Catholics – especially Protestants – must have believed. But the things he knows are not entirely accurate, and his extrapolations even less so. In characterizing Protestantism as steady-state determinism, for instance, he ignores the significant continuities between medieval Catholic and Protestant theologies, the prominent role of sanctification in Calvin’s and Puritan theology, the notion of regeneration. He ignores the cross as an epoch-making event. In fact, a plausible – I think convincing – argument can be made that one of Protestantism’s great contributions to the church was a rediscovery the historical dimension of Christianity.

Anyone who suggests, as Curran does, that Protestant determinism undermined casuistry has never cracked a volume of Richard Baxter. While Protestants did deny that humans can control God (113), the central Calvinist doctrine of the covenant was all about God’s voluntary self-binding. When Curran characterizes Hamlet’s “There is a special providence in the fall of a sparrow” as capturing “the hard logic of predestinarian Christianity” (205), the prejudice is obvious. Hamlet wants to talk about birdies, but Curran takes it as logic, and hard logic at that. For a sect that believed humans “make no contribution to history,” Puritans sure contributed more than their share.

Let me illustrate Curran’s theological simplifications with a couple of specific examples. He rightly notes that Calvin interpreted the est of the words of institution figuratively and that he repudiated “the idea of our physical eating of Christ.” From this, he concludes that “Calvin admitted that the Protestant Eucharist removed the immediacy of our connection to God and made the divine more distant to us” (22-23). This is flat wrong. In the very passage where Calvin argues that there is no presence “in the bread,” he insists that believers are jointed to Christ by the Supper, though the Spirit “which unites Christ himself to us” (Institutes 4.17.31). The Supper is for Calvin a “vehicle” by which the Spirit overcomes all “distance” between the church and the heavenly Christ. Calvin is only too happy to speak of “feeding on Christ” and being knit “bone to his bone, flesh to his flesh.” Check the liturgy: Who is closer to the bread that is Christ’s body – medieval Catholics who watch from the nave or Calvinists who take and eat?

Curran also misconstrues Calvinist treatments of freewill and predestination. He thinks that the Calvinist emphasis on predestination must preclude meaningful human action and render the warnings of Scripture nugatory. But Calvinists regularly sought to explain how predestination was different from determinism, and how predestination could coexist with genuine, though qualified, human freedom. High supralapsarian Puritan William Perkins explains that the decree of predestination “doth altogether order every euent, partly by inclining and gently bending the will in all things that are good, and partly by forsaking it in things that are euill: yet the will of the creature left vnto itselfe, is carried headlong of [its] owne accord, not of necessitie in itselfe, but contingently that way which the decree of God determined from eternitie” (Golden Chaine, Works 2.621). This may not convince Curran, but it is certainly evidence that Protestants did not “ignore” (77) the difficulties of their theology.

If some Protestants (not Calvin) admittedly broke the bond of sign and thing from one direction, Catholicism arguably did from the other. Hamlet’s musings on the contrast between his inky cloak and the sorrows that pass show display his desire for “genuineness and sincerity,” which in Curran’s terms is a “Catholic” yearning: “No gap should lie between inner and outer; we should instead find an absolute correspondence between them, of the type we get with the Catholic Eucharist” (p. 36). It’s fairly obvious, though, that transubstantiation creates a chasm between inner and outer, appearance and reality, since transubstantiation is a theory about how the inner reality can be utterly changed while the outer appearances remain. In transubstantiation, the bread-accidents veil rather than display the supernatural miracle taking place behind the curtain. Inky cloaks, on the premises of transubstantiation, might well conceal hearts of pure white, and vice versa. Smiles might be masks of a villain.

Curran doesn’t find it possible to remain consistent with his own paradigm. In the Not to be, anything is possible; contingency is absolute. Yet, Curran is critical of Claudius for trying to combine “an auspicious and a dropping eye,” charging that if so “one eye is lying.” But what happened to both-and? Why, other than the fact that Claudius is the villain and Protestantism is the villain, should Curran conclude that Claudius is expressing a “Protestant” viewpoint? Curran also is ambiguous about whether the play mourns the “loss of contingency” – as if contingency were a somehow real prior to the Reformation – or whether Shakespeare is bemoaning a world that objectively is the Be. Hamlet’s cloak can depict his bottomless grief, he realizes, only in its inability to denote those depths (“called bottom because it has no bottom”): “He wants an extravagant display to register an all-consuming grief, but the display is not extravagant enough and the grief is not all-consuming” (p. 49). Is the display ever extravagant enough? Is there not always that within which passes show? If so, are we not all Protestants? Is the Be simply what there is?

My point is not to engage in Protestant-Catholic polemics. I am fully aware that Catholicism has its answers to the objections I posed above. My point is only to show that things are far more complex than Curran’s simple binarism allows. But this criticism, substantial as it is, doesn’t get to the heart of Curran’s thesis. After all, Shakespeare might have been as unsubtle a theologian as Curran. Perhaps the Protestantism Shakespeare knew was what theologian James Jordan has called “Islamo-Calvinism.” The critical question for Curran’s book is not whether he got Protestantism right; he didn’t. The question is what Shakespeare might have believed about Protestantism. Or, better, the question is whether or not Curran provides a coherent reading of Hamlet.

On this score, the book is a more impressive achievement, though not an unmixed one. He has a tendency to ignore the drama in favor of a morality play of disembodied ideas. Hamlet becomes an intellectual puzzle. When Curran does keep the text of the play in view, however, his insights are often fruitful. Drawing on Barbara Everett, he points to patterns of circularity and doubling that keep the characters and action turning back on itself. The king in the play scene provides the most dramatic example: He dies in the dumb show, lies on his death bed in the play, is killed by Lucianus, and then is “symbolically re-re-re-killed when his queen marries his murderer” (p. 97). And this of course foreshadows the strange climactic double-death of Claudius, who is both stung by his own venom and made to drink his own poisoned chalice.

Even his usually clumsy Protestant/Catholic paradigm can work at times. Claudius at prayer is a true Protestant, who knows that shows of piety merit no response from heaven, without a change of heart. Observing him, Hamlet draws a “Catholic” conclusion – if he went through the motions of penance, he is forgiven, and killing him at that point is poor revenge (140-141). The “nunnery” to which Hamlet wants to consign Ophelia is a whorehouse, but it is only so on the Protestant assumption that human beings lack the power for sexual restraint (186-187).

Curran is most fruitful in examining the ending of Hamlet, and at this point he throws open some perspectives on the play as a whole. The clever opening to Arnold Schwartzenegger’s Last Action Hero got the play right: Hamlet v. the action hero. Hamlet has all the trappings of an action film: “you killed my father – big mistake,” the handsome sensitive intelligent prince, the love interest, the cloak-and-daggerish maneuvering that leads to the final confrontation between the hero and the villain. Shakespeare knew how to write such stuff, keeping Prince Hal and Hotspur, Macbeth and Macduff apart until the final climactic duel. In Hamlet, though, the expected end never comes. Everything is chugging toward the climax, but Hamlet and Claudius never square off. In the last scene, Claudius is still acting through a surrogate. Worse, Hamlet’s hope for “a distinctive and proportional revenge” collapses into a scene that “fails to contain any nobility whatever.”: “Everyone dies, along with his father’s ambitions and endeavors, and that is that. Anti-climactic, spur-of-the-moment, clumsy, and cruel without some potentially compensating dash or flair to it, the deed itself has no dignity” (214). Hamlet speaks of providence while recounting his clever cruel dispatch of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Surely Curran is right that all this casts a dark question mark across Hamlet’s faith in heaven’s providence: “Heaven has ordained this?” (p. 216).

This gives us something to work with, at two levels. Most obviously, Hamlet is a revenge tragedy, and like most plays in this genre it depicts the uncontrollable potency of revenge. Where does the blood stop once we open a wound? Blood flows and flows as long as there is another blood, and bloody, relative to take up the cause – which is as long as forever – or until every relevant person lies in his own personal pool of blood. Shakespeare numbs us with the catastrophe of revenge. He finishes not merely with blood but with an apocalypse of blood. In the end, it’s not “Kill,” but “Kill, kill, kill, kill, kill.”

Hamlet is far more than a revenge tragedy, else Schwartzenegger would be as likely to play a parody Hieronimo as a parody Hamlet. The “more” is partly the more of a mysterious universality that hovers about Hamlet’s predicament, a point underscored by the play’s repeated hints of a fallen Eden (unweeded garden, the serpent who kills the king and takes his crown, the primal eldest’s curse). But one does not have to be an over-theorized new historicist to recognize the strength of Curran’s claim that Hamlet also resonates with contemporary cultural and, especially, religious issues. This too has textual support: Wittenberg, diet of worms, providence and conscience.

Curran’s distribution of roles, however, is easily reversible. Hamlet, after all, has come from Wittenberg, cradle of Protestantism, and encounters a ghost fresh from Purgatory. That suggests Hamlet is a Protestant in Catholic world, rather than the opposite. Shakespeare invents a Roman name for Claudius (Fengon in the original story), and, as David Kaula has argued, Shakespeare uses ancient Rome as proxy for Papal Rome. Kaula spots apocalyptic allusions throughout the play, from Horatio’s learned discourse on the harbingers of Caesar’s death to the last scene, where Claudius raises, and drinks, a poisoned chalice, like the Whore of Revelation, which English Protestants often interpreted as a symbol of the doomed Catholic Church.

I don’t think this alternative morality play works any better than Curran’s. Rather, the variety of plausible connections shows that the religious interests of the play work at a more abstract level than Curran believes. The play depicts a clash between an old world and a new, a clash that has religious, cultural and political dimensions. Hamlet pere is a medieval knight, dressed in armor complete with beaver and operating by the standards of chivalric single combat. Claudius, who must be roughly his contemporary, is every inch a Renaissance prince. Ring out the old, ring in the new. Paul Cantor very plausibly interprets the play as a battle between classical heroism, rejuvenated by the Renaissance, and Christian ethical demands, a war carried out not only in Elsinore’s hallways but in the soul of Elsinore’s Prince.

Hamlet does not find his Catholic (and prophetic) soul stymied by the Protestant universe around him. Rather, the play suggests that Protestant and Catholic bloodlust can only end with same stupid slaughter. Hamlet might be a Catholic avenger who wants to restore the traditional world of his father’s Denmark. Claudius might be the usurping Protestant, with blood on his hands that won’t wash clean. The resolution of the play warns that every effort to avenge the father is going to end in blood, and in the shadows waits Norway’s (Machiavellian?) Fortinbras, ready to step in to reverse the results of his father’s defeat in single combat. If there is a contemporary “message” in Hamlet, it seems to me the same message of Shakespeare’s other plays: It is a Christian humanist’s prescient warning that fanaticism will lead to civil war, the killing of a king, and the triumph of amoral Realpolitik. This is the apocalypse whose outlines Shakespeare could already see at the beginning of England’s century of revolution, the tragic slather of blood he hoped English might become wise enough to avoid.