this is i, hamlet the dane

7/28/2019 This is I, Hamlet the Dane

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Sebastian Morales-Bermudez

Reading HamletSimon Critchley

December 19, 2012

This is I , Hamlet the Dane

The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmarkis thought to be based on an older Anglo-

Saxon play calledAmleth. Part of Shakespeares innovation was to change the original title

through the subtle shift of the position of the last letter (h), placing it in front to create the name:

(H)amlet. In the play it is the name of two people, a murdered-king-father and a living-prince-

son. But going back the Germanic ham (home), and entering Middle English as hamelet, a

hamletsince around the 14th

C. referred to a village without a church.1

In fact, such was its

particular British usage. If Shakespeares title/character change was not an arbitrary coincidence,

then it bears the question: what might the particulars of a hamletas a village, have to do with the

particulars of the characters named Hamlet?2

Does the play, in any way, describe events, actions,

or things that involve the Hamlet characters in tensions between the need for and the lack of a

church? Because the question forces us into to the particulars of institutions like churches, and as

a consequence with the particulars of doctrine, our first task will be to establish the historical and

geographical equivalent that Shakespeare might have had in mind when describing Denmark in

Hamlet, so as to define its doctrinal orthodoxy, and its consequent relationship with churches.

DENMARK AND BEYOND

There are multiple ways in which the Denmark of ShakespearesHamletis Elizabethan

England. From the paranoid world of spies that killed Marlowe, to the orchestrations of the Privy

1Online Etymology Dictionary.

2There is also the possibility that he changed the play to Hamlet as homage to his son, Hamlet, who some years

prior to the writing of the play died at age eleven. But then, the fact that Shakespeare named his own son Hamlet

still begs the question of the kind of world Shakespeare thought his son was growing up in. Studying the play is our

way of calling forth that world. I have taken the fact of Shakespeares sons death from the documentary series In

Search of Shakespeare, Episode 3.


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Council, to the foreign threats of the Spanish Armada, to the tremendous religious divide

between the old and the new faith, all the way to Englands island relationship to the sea,

Hamlets Denmarkshines forth as this exact world. Accepting such particulars as typical of

Elizabethan England, we can point to their presence in the play.

It is no secret thatHamletis infested with pernicious webs of spies, or else the constant

espionage of all characters. It is an orgy of voyeurs. There is Polonius and Claudius use of

Ophelia as bait to uncover the reason for prince Hamlets madness; also Polonius dismissal of

Reynaldo to investigate how very wild, Addicted3is Laertes in France; Claudius order to

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to find out the reason for Hamlets madness; Hamlets mouse-trap

and his request to Horatio to observe King Claudius reaction closely. Even Horatio, with his

opportune timings, and his swift delivery of the kingdom to Fortinbras at the end of the play,

leaves one wondering if he was not playing for the Norwegians all throughout. Queen

Elizabeths William Cecil, and especially spy-master Francis Walsingham come to mind. These

spy games were related to the factions of Elizabeths increasingly powerful Privy Council.

Indeed powerful to the point of creating tensionsbetween sovereign power and the councils

requirements (that Elizabeth kill Queen Mary of Scots, that she marry, etc.). Though much like

Elizabeths case, Claudius is a strong figure that holds his own for a good amount, he remains

conscious of his own reliance upon the aid and support of his close-ones. We will deal with this

in more closeness when investigating notions ofbody politic in the play.

Despite the fact that Denmark has both a coast and terrestrial borders, Shakespeares

descriptions of Denmarks frontiers flourish in sea-talk. At times it is so islandesque that just a

short walk carries the danger of falling into the ocean. Such, at least, is the warning that Horatio

gives to prince Hamlet as he follows his fathers ghost: What if it tempt you toward the flood,

3William Shakespeare, 54. Hamlet(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003).


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my lord,/ or to the dreadful summit of the cliff/ That bee tles oer his base into the seaThink of

it./The very place puts toys of desperation,/ Without more motive, into every brain/ That looks so

many fathoms to the sea/ And hears it roar beneath.4The sea is also present in Hamlets journey

to England, his encounter with the pirates (who were an important problem for Elizabethan

England), and Hamlets sea-fight.5

Surrounding and beneath, the sea is so present it is not

surprising the earth seems to Prince Hamlet a promontory.6

More importantly for our purposes, it is the religious tensions of Elizabethan England that

the play also mirrors. There is a critical sense in which the world ofHamletails with

cosmological schizophrenia. From Vulcan, to Hecate, to Hyperion, to Angels and Ministers, to

witches, cherubs, priests, and ghosts, there are just too many kinds of beings for the accepted

spaces of an Anglican world.For if Denmark is England, then Anglicanism is the orthodoxy

within which we are dealing. But its Heaven and Hell do not come close to assuming

responsibility for the imaginary that Elsinore bears. Though this is not unlike Elizabethan

England itself, with its survey of astrologers, natural philosophers, chrysopoeians, alchemists,

iatro-chemists, hermeticists, theologians and Rosicrucians; and these often combined into a

single philosophy. It was a messy world full of forces and images that might appear

contradictory. As Christopher Haigh has put it, it was a time ofliturgical hermaphrodites. But

Queen Elizabeth was at least drawing the line against the Old Catholic faith, as it bore yet

another world of both liturgy and cosmology that, in demanding papal authority, threatened her

sovereignty. As Keith Wrightston has put it:

It was a confessional state bound by an Act of Uniformity that the prayer book should be

used throughout the kingdom, uniformity to the religion set down by the Queen in

4Ibid. 40. There are, however, instances of terrestrial frontier-talk, such as Fortinbras request to pass through

Denmark in order to attack Poland.5

Ibid. 208.6

Ibid. 75


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Parliament, what was often described as 'the religion by law established'. But that religionwas less imposed by simple royal dictate than a reflection of what Elizabeth and her

advisers had proved willing to settle for. There was no doubt that England had turned in a

broadly Protestant direction again, but there was also a lot of ambiguity about the natureand the extent of that Protestantism.7

InHamletthis tension with Catholicism appears subtly, but crucially for our question. One way

in which it appears is through the pressures of exterior forces like the Norwegians and the

Polacks, the latter being clear sings of Catholicism. Through the Polacks the threat of the

Spanish Armada, and its own Catholicism, naturally come to mind. But it is above all at a

cosmological level that the tension occurs inHamlet, as a place rejected by the English Church

and upheld by Catholicism becomes central to the story, mainly, Purgatory.

The image of Purgatory, and its general Protestant criticisms, rises in relation to the

appearance of King Hamlets ghost to Prince Hamlet. As the Ghost begins his first speech to

Hamlet, he explains his hurry: My hour is almost come,/ When I to sulfrous and tormenting

flames/ Must render up myself.8

As King Hamlet explains some lines below, he has been

Doomed for a certain term to walk the night, And for the day confined to fast in fires, Till the

foul crimes done in my days of nature, Are burnt and purged away.9

This image is clearly

purgatorial, as it describes precisely the Catholic conception of Purgatorys relationship to the

souls that inhabit it. Filled with purgatorial fire, the tortures of Purgatory purge the sinful residue

of the deceased in order to prepare them for the beatific vision of Paradise. Indeed, King

Hamlets lack of areckoning10

fits well with the kind of preparation that Purgatory is meant to

provide. However, King Hamlet blames his fall to these tortures on account of his being

poisoned in the blossoms of [his] sin.11

It is difficult to define the implications of this event for

7From Keith Wrightnons lectures at Yale. Seewww.opencourses.com

8Ibid. 42.

9Ibid. 42.

10Ibid. 46

11Ibid. 45.
http://www.opencourses.com/http://www.opencourses.com/http://www.opencourses.com/http://www.opencourses.com/


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King Hamlets purgation. On the Anglican side, the 1559 Book of Common Prayer, which denies

the existence of Purgatory,12

does draw attention to cases in which:

If any man, either by reason of extremitie of sickenes, or for lacke of warnyng indue time to the Curateor by any other just impediment, do not receive theSacrament of Christes body and bloud, then the Curate shall instruct hym, that if

he do truly repent hym of his synnes, and steadfastly believe that Jesus Christe

hath sufred death upon the crosse for him, and shed his bloud for his

redempcionhe doth eate and dryncke the body and blonde of our saviorChriste, profitably to his soules health, although he doe not receive the Sacramant

with his mouthe.13

Within Anglican cosmology, death implies facing either Heaven or Hell, and to this extent true

faith at the moment of death, even if not ritually upheld, is sufficient to justify the souls entrance

to Heaven. King Hamlet, however, in proper Catholic logic, inhabits and visits his son from a

space that is undeniably Purgatory. From the Catholic perspective, the purge of Purgatory is

conceived of as highly tormenting and difficult to go through; in every sense something

unimaginable to a human. However, it is not to be understood as the result of a terribly sinful

life, nor of an improper death. The tradition of Purgatory, as it began its intensified and

systematized entrance into the dogma of Christianity in the 11

th

C., became a place through

which even future saints passed (thereby giving time for the long canonizing process of the

Vatican). Such a standard was set by St. Bernard of Clairvaux, and from him onwards the notion

12Article XXII of the AnglicanThirty-Nine Articles of Religionstates that "The Romish Doctrine concerning

Purgatoryis a fond thing, vainly invented, and grounded upon no warranty ofScripture, but rather repugnant tothe Word of God."13

The Communion of the Sick. The Book of Common Prayer (1559). Available at

Justus.anglican.org/resources/bcp/1559/BCP_1559.htm. I have chosen to quote from the 1559 version because

this was the last version Elizabeth had made and because the only innovation the James I gave to it in 1604 was

the addition of his Proclamation for Unity. The 1559 version, additionally, was notorious in its blending of old

and new faith, though even then Purgatory was not part of the mix. As Wrightson says: in the prayer book of 1559

that they brought to Parliament the communion service was in fact a blend of the prayer book of 1552 with its very

Protestant statements regarding the communion service being essentially a service of remembrance and

thanksgiving. They blended that with the earlier 1549 prayer book which had allowed for the possibility that there

was a real presence of Christ's body and blood in the communion service.The Pope excommunicated Elizabeth in1570.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty-Nine_Articleshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty-Nine_Articleshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty-Nine_Articleshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty-Nine_Articles


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presided that many of the most righteous people passed through purgatory momentarily.14

With

this confusion of cosmologies and effects, we near the cosmological confusion ofHamlet.

St. Bernard of Clairvaux, however, is important for our story in yet another sense, as his

visions of visiting souls from Purgatory helped generate the classical structure of encounters with

visitors from Purgatory. As Jacques Le Goff has summarized it in The Birth of Purgatory, the

general format of visitations occurred through visions or dreams in which the deceased appeared

before a loved one: their torturers from the other world make sure that the number of

apparitions is kept to a minimum, and their supporters in this world order them to report exactly

what is happening to them.15 Not only was the trope of visiting ghosts increasingly recurrent in

the Christian world as a consequence of these visions, but they generally involved a tension

between the demands of the torturers of Purgatory and the desire, ultimately unfulfilled, of the

visited one to know what Purgatory is like. As King Hamlet assures his son, I am forbid/ To tell

the secrets of my prison-house.16

Particular to the visitation of King Hamlets ghost, however, is

his claim to be forced back to Purgatory on account of the conditions of the living world: Fare

thee well at once!/ The glow-worm shows the matin to be near, And gins to pale his uneffectual

fire.17

The dawning of the sun prevents the ghost from staying longer even though, in

comparison with the fires of purgatory, its fire ispale anduneffectual.

In another sense, it is only too fitting that the image of Purgatory drawn out inHamlet

remains idiosyncratic. Purgatorys proliferation, prior and after the Reformation, was in many

ways the result of the freedom in imagining its architectural structures, particular geography, and

inhabitants. When after long years of formation the Council of Trent (1562) established

14Jacques Le Goff, 163. The Birth of Purgatory. Trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: Chicago University Press,

1986).15

Ibid, 164.16

Shakespeare, 42. I did not come across other descriptions of Purgatory as a prison-house.17

Ibid. 46.


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Purgatory as dogma once and for all[it]remained noncommittal as to Purgatorys imaginary

content.18

The task of concretizing the imaginary content of Purgatory would fall on Catholics

of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. One element, however, was from at least the 13th

C.

attached to purgatory: hope. And in this regard, King Hamlets ghost seems to be operating

outside the fold, emphasizing the tortures, his own sinfulness, and in no way speaking about a

future possibility for his access to Paradise. This negativity about his state in many ways shapes

a further oddity of the purgatorial visitation inHamlet: the ghost asks for the wrong thing.

PURGATORY AND THE CHURCH

Starting with the Carolingian necrologies of the 9th

and 10th

centuries, where the

individual names of all the dead were recorded to be read out at the office of the prime[and

in] liturgical remembrance, paying homage to an individualthrough liturgicalmeans was to

become an increasingly popular activity of the Church.19

The shift from a general worship to a

particularized and recorded worship of the dead became an even more prominentpractice

through the Gregorian reforms of the 11th

century. But the increase of this activity was

contingent upon the growth of a space wherein such liturgical homage could gain efficacy, that

is, a place not eternal, wherein time still abided, and as a result, within which the quality of the

existence of the dead could be affected and changed. Purgatory would become such a place and

time, and though in formation for many centuries (especially existing as astate of being:

purgation, since at least Augustine), it would not become concretized until the 13th

century.20

As Purgatory ossified into an official place of the Christian imaginary, the corresponding

liturgical interaction of the living with this place also began taking an official form. These

liturgical practices were understood as ways of caring for the dead, and therefore required certain

18Le Goff. 357.

19Ibid. 125.

20This is Le Goffs general thesis. His evidence is very good.


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works from those caring to enact any effect on the dead. Two practices predominated: prayer

and suffrage. However, the capacity for these practices to gain efficacy required the

intervention of the Church, in particular for the eucharistic sacrificewhich afforded the Church

the benefits of alms.21

This empowerment of the Church was especially put forward by the 13th

C. English Franciscan, Alexander of Hales. The difficulty was in arguing for a human Church

that could affect dead souls, that is, souls that were ostensibly within the direct fold of Gods

judgment. But Alexander argued that since those [in Purgatory] are in the middle, and since

they belong neither entirely to the militant nor entirely to the triumphant Church, they can be

subject to the power of the priest because of the power of the keys.

22

As the souls of Purgatory

occupied a middle position, neither entirely with God, nor entirely without him, the keys

given by Jesus to Peter and, through Peter, to all the bishops and priests, still provided the

Church with the ability to affect the souls in Purgatory. The extent of the power of these rites for

the dead, however, was limited. Alexander emphasized that praying and lamenting for [the

dead] is an aid to satisfaction; it does not create satisfaction in itself, but with the pain of the

penitent aids in satisfaction, which is the very definition of suffrage.23 Suffrage and prayer

could aidin the satisfaction of the dead, but could not bring it about. In Le Goffs terms, which

he borrows from feudal law, God and the Church hadpariage over Purgatory, a coseigniory.24

These developments of Church authority led to the innovation of indulgences, though

during the 13th

C. such a practice was reserved for the Crusaders alone.25

It was Alexander of

Hales student, Bonaventure, that took a further step in the empowerment of the Church by

stating that any reprieves upon those in Purgatory relied upon the authority of the Church in

21Ibid. 135.

22Cited in Ibid. 248. This was by no means the only position in the 12

thC., even from within the orthodox fold.

Alan of Lille, in his Liber poenitentialis, argues that after death the Church has no power (see Le Goff. 172).23

Cited in 249.24

Ibid. 249.25

Ibid.


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general, but of the pope in particular.26

It is not surprising, therefore, that on the year 1300 Pope

Boniface VIII conducted the first Christian Jubilee for the general forgiveness of all Christians.

Having established the necessity of the pope for any human intercession within Purgatory, only

one further idea accompanied this growing vision of Church-purgatorial relations. It was the

notion elaborated by Albert Magnus that the definitive theological virtue which the act of

suffrage required from the practitioner was love (caritas).27

Such love was the charity that, as

Thomas Aquinas put it, links the members of the Church [and] is valuable not only to the living

but also to the dead who have died in a state of loveThe dead live on in the memory of the

livingand so the suffrages of the living can be useful to the dead.

28

The particular activities

involved in the suffrage were the giving of alms, prayer, and the mass (for the Eucharist is the

source of charity and is the only sacrament whose efficacy is communicable29

).

With these understandings in place we can return to King Hamlets ghost and his

wrong request. Purgatorial visitors, following the typical structure of visitation we have

explained above, tended to ask for prayers and suffrages, as these were the understood enablers

of change within Purgatory. Usually in the form of prayers to saints, service to these canonized

Christians could move them to intercede for Purgatorial souls and aid them in their assent to

Paradise. In the case of King Hamlets ghost, however, his request is revenge. There is no

mention of prayer, nor any mention of the desire to be helped in the acceleration of his purgation.

Indeed, where he to ask for such a thing, Catholic cosmology and Anglican institutions would

clash in all their obviousness. But even in the negative form, as an obviation of the common

logic of Purgatory, King Hamlets purgation carries a fatalistic tone, the opposite of hope.

26Ibid. 254. Emphasis added.

27Ibid. 266

28Cited in Ibid. 275

29Ibid. 276-277.


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By exploring the reasons for this fatalistic tone, we can near the ways in which the

Hamlet character mirror a village without a church. For, after all, it is not as ifHamletprovides

us with a Denmark that has no physical church buildings. We come to glean the existence of

these in limited but existing references. There are references to churchyards,30

to a church

bell,31

as well as the more concrete response Laertes gives to Claudius when the latter asks him

what he would do if Hamlet, the killer of his father, would return to Denmark: I would cut his

throat i the church.32

Despite their existence, however, these are not churches to which the

purgatorial soul can appeal. Their dismissal of papal authority,33

and of purgatory itself as an

existing place, leaves them without any authority over such a realm. For the ghost, and indeed

for the whole enterprise of Prince Hamlets revenge, this carries a great tragic undertone. To an

important extent Prince Hamlets institutional-religious world has no knowledge and makes no

mention of the world his father now inhabits. How is he to respond to such a visitation in the

context of his own Purgatory-less world?

It is no surprise that after seeing his fathers ghost depart, Hamlets reaction signals a

blurry recognition ofa world he cannot name. O all you host of heaven! he yells as the ghost

exists, O earth! What else? And shall I couple hell?34

The what else? resounds precisely

between the naming of heaven and hell, but remains an empty signifier, a question inquiring into

further possibilities of space and the states of death. As Hamlet admits some lines later, his is a

distracted globe; both the globe of his memory/mind that cannot identify the place his father

inhabits, and the globe that Denmark has built, denying an entire part of it. In meeting the ghost,

30Shakespeare, 127

31Ibid. 200

32Ibid. 183.

33The rejection of Papal authority was crucial for the Elizabethan Queendom. As professor Wrightson remarks:

Elizabeth wasAnne Boleyn's daughter so it was in a sense her conception in December of 1532 that had finally

precipitated the assertion of Henry VIII's royal supremacy. So you could say in a sense that Elizabeth's whole

identity, and above all her claims to the throne, were bound up with the rejection by her father of papal

authority.34

Ibid. 46.


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therefore, Hamlets world is being re-shaped, or rather confused, and it will be an ongoing

process for Hamlet to locate the place, and as a consequence the truthfulness of the ghost he saw

take the shape of his father. After all, to believe the ghost, to trust him in all faith, requires a

cosmology capable of assimilating the fact of purging after death, or else the ghosts suffering

is just hell-born.

Indeed, before meeting the ghost Hamlet echoes his Anglicanism and keeps close to him

the possibility that what he will see is coming from hell, the Anglican abode of all ghosts who

are not angels. Thus Hamlet affirms to Horatio: Ill speak to it, though hell itself should gape/

And bid me hold my peace.35In fact, as the ghost first enters, the prince calls forth Angels and

ministers of grace36

to defend them from the demon.37

This suspicion of the ghosts hellishness

will return once again as the catalyst for the staging of the mouse-trap. So the prince tells

himself, The spirit I have seen May be a devil, and the devil hath power/ T assume pleasing

shapeyea, and perhaps/ Abuses me to damn me.38

This extends to Hamlets confusion

about what it is that he is serving in seeking revenge. In Act 2 he blurs all cosmological lines and

sees himself prompted to revenge by both heaven and hell.39

When killing of Polonius,

however, Hamlet identifies himself as a minister of heaven alone, trying to calm Gertrude by

saying, For this same lord,/ I do repent, but heaven hath pleased it so,/ To punish me with this

and this with me,/ That I must be their scourge and minister.40

35Ibid. 26.

36Ibid. 38

37The relationship between angels and the Anglican Church is complicated, but the persecution of angels portraits

extended more to the notion that it was idolatrous to represent the invisible (though John Dee didnt think so) in

terrestrial visible form. It certainly did not amount to a denial of their existence. Therefore all the angel-talk in

Hamletcannot be taken as a further sign of Catholicism. See Joad Raymond. Protestant Culture: Miltons Angels.

History Today. Vol 60. Issue 12, 2012.38

Ibid. 9139

Ibid. 9140

Ibid. 144.


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PRINCE HAMLETS COSMOS

There is an important sense in which the world of prince Hamlet is bursting beyond its

framed limits, and his relationship with cosmological places and concepts points to this. From

the prince that is not afraid of accepting the mystery of the world in its wonders, telling scholarly

Horatio: There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,/ Than are dreamt of in your

philosophy,41

Hamlet increasingly nears an agnosticism about it all, at times expressing outright

nihilism. Looking before the sky, in dull breath, he sighs: this most excellent canopy, the air,

look you, this brave erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why, it

appears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapor.42 There is a

stagnation of his other-worldly imagination, the very consequence of a lack in the infrastructure

of his associations to make order of the chaotic proliferation of contradictory cosmoses, and the

subsequent fear that these be his own phantasmsimaged fantasies. Indeed, in his considerations

of suicide, Hamlets fear is precisely the excess of the imagination. Though he also is weary of

the canon gainst self-slaughter,43

the pressure that holds him alive is an uncertainty about

death, and with it a fear that in death one may, as in sleep, still dream.There is the rub, he

says, For in that sleep of death what dreams may come/ When we have shuffled off this mortal

coil.44

Against a notion of death as a kind of eternal comma, Hamlet weighs the possibility of a

death in which the imagination violently rolls vision after vision. And it is the nature of these

visions that keep him most frightened and unsure about death. This view of death does not have

in mind the purgatorial world, nor does it refer to heaven or hell. If anything, it is a solipsistic

death in which one is eternally subjected to the endless tyranny ofones own imaginings (so

perhaps a Dostoesvskian hell, or a Tibetan Buddhist hell?).

41Ibid. 50.

42Ibid. 75

43Ibid. 20

44Ibid. 97


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From an excessive imagination that chaotically shatters his world boundaries, emerges

Hamlets wish for a quietus, and this wish is carried through to his desire and feeling of utter

loneliness, a loneliness that would be unwarranted in a world where love binds the living and the

dead. In a short but telling phrase, he gives word to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern: Ay, so. God

be wye. Now I am alone.45

Yes, God be with you, I am alone, without Him. This

distancing from God re-appears in another odd phrasing: Gods bodkin, man, much better! Use

every man after his desert, and who shall scape whipping?46

It is much better, in other words,

to speak of man as man than to speak of man aspart of Gods body, for we will all be whipped,

and how silly it would be for God to whip himself. Though in another sense, this universal

whipping is well understood through Purgatory. Purgatory, in fact, will keep re-appearing in

Hamlets words, though barely recognizable.

It appears fleetingly, often surrounding Claudius death in one way or another. Certainly,

the clearest expression of Hamlets thoughts about the otherworldly existence of Claudius,

uttered when he runs into the praying king, says nothing of Purgatory. Though he does conceive

of the Augustinian notion of purging that takes place in this world , after death it is a matter of

Heaven or Hell for Claudius. It is preciselybecause he does not want to take him (Claudius) in

the purging of his soul,47

that Hamlet does not kill the king while he is praying, as such

purgation amounts for Hamlet to a direct heavenly ascent. What he wants for Claudius is no

relish of salvation;48

Hell.

But Purgatory does come up just before this scene, when Rosencrantz and Guildenstern

tell Hamlet how much the mouse-trap has upset Claudius. Hamlet answers wittingly, Your

wisdom should show itself more richer to signify this to his doctorfor, for me to put him to his

45Ibid. 89

46Ibid. 88

47Ibid. 132.

48Ibid. 133.


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purgation would perhaps plunge him into far more choler.49

If I were to kill him, in other

words, the kind of torture hed receive would be so magnanimous that i t would far heighten his

anger. But it is not eternal punishment that Hamlet speaks of, but rather of putting him to his

purgation. Importantly, Guildenstern finds this unintelligible: Good my lord, he tells Hamlet,

put your discourse into some frame and start not so wildly from my affair.50

That Hamlets

reference to Purgatory is absolutely unintelligible to others is understandable, for it is not a part

of their world. But it also amounts to increasing isolation, and the incapacity for Hamlet to relate

his cosmos with the cosmos of those around him. This tension recurs once more, though also

through a well-coated expression. Upon being pressed for the location of Polonius corpse,

Hamlet tells Claudius: In heaven. Send thither to see. If your messenger find him not there, seek

him ithother place yourself(hell). But if/ indeed you find him not within this month, you shall

nose/ him as you go up the stairs into the lobby.51

This allegorical reference to Purgatory can be

gleaned on the ground that Purgatory is precisely what is as you go up, before Paradise, and

where one, as in a lobby, awaits. The reference gains its detail on account of a context in

which the two options of Heaven and Hell are referred to, and around which a third option is

introduced. Claudius, however, misses the mark and sends his attendants to Go seek him

there.52

We do not hear from the attendants again, however.

Hamlets reception of his fathers otherworldly visit is, as such, disruptive to his entire

world. The elements no longer add up. Furthermore, it creates an intense inability to engage

directly with the beingof his father, and this increases Hamlets hesitation toward acting for him.

Hamlets helplessness before his father is keenly felt through the disjunction between cosmos

and institutions, as there is no church around the young prince that allows him the taper the

49Ibid. 122.

50Ibid. 123

51Ibid. 154-155.

52Ibid. 155.


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sufferings of his father. Neither can the love he has for his father be enacted as a connecting link

through communion. Denmark is a world where the dead are to be left alone, and where the

living do not share in their business. To such amounts Claudius speech in the beginning of the

play: Why should we in our peevish opposition/ Take it to heart? Fie, tis a fault to heaven,/ A

fault against the dead, a fault to nature,/ To reason most absurd, whose common theme/ Is death

of fathers.53

The process of mourning is short and reasonably so. People die all the time and it is

senseless to continue burdening ourselves with their remembrance. They are cut off from the

natural living world. To mourn, in fact, is a fault to heaven, for that is surely where King

Hamlet is. Though Hamlet finds it necessary to extend his relationship with his father beyond

natures grip, his means are limited. Even after the visitation of the ghost, his mourning is

stagnated by remorse and revenge.

The ability to transform mourning into an activity of love and aiding is null. And perhaps

this is what Hamlet so poignantly states when naming himself before Ophelias corpse. Grieving

Laertes clings to Ophelias body, fighting nature, saying Hold off the earth awhile,/ Till I have

caught her once more in mine arms.54

He commands the gravediggers to pile your dust upon

the quick and dead/ Till of this flat a mountain you have made/ To oertop old Pelion or the

skyish head of blue Olympus.55

This grieving, so ignorant of the other world, appears to Hamlet

senseless. As he say, What is he whose grief/ Bears such an emphasis? Whose phrase of

sorrow/Conjures the wndring stars and makes them stand/ Like wonder-wounded hearers?56

Laertes grief leads him to utter a phrase of sorrow that implies the stars of the natural world

could be wounded by such death. He is in such need of cosmological response to the death of

his sister that he moves to animate nature, and to Hamlet, who has glimpsed how the dead live,

53Ibid. 19

54Ibid. 201

55Ibid.

56Ibid.


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this amounts to immense ignorance about the possibilities of death, let alone the possibilities of

interacting with it. But, nonetheless, Hamlet shares enormous empathy with Laertes, and himself

immensely grieves the death of his loved one, Ophelia. The whole cosmological confusion is

thus summarized in a re-cognition, an acceptance that this is indeed a village without a church,

without any room for the living and the dead to co-exist and interact in loving communion.

Knowing that, as with his father, he will have no mechanism of aiding Ophelia in death (whose

death circumstances shine lots of otherworldly fire), nor of communing with her, Hamlet carries

the load of his name: This is I, Hamlet the Dane.57

Echoing the Germanic roots of his name,

Hamlet admits the nature of his home.

OUR BODY AND ITS HEAD

The sense of disconnection between the living and the dead that we have been pressing

upon, however, is not merely a matter of Hamlets individual churchlesness. For after all, the

name signifies a village. Consistently, the play discloses clues that speak of a communal

impossibility and disruption, a churchlesness in the sense of a broken church body (Corpus

Christi, and these arise especially when considering what it means to be king.

Since early in the play we are introduced to the metaphor of Denmark as a body. Trying

to explain to Laertes the relationship between Polonius and Denmark, Claudius resorts to this

precise metaphor: The head is not more native to the heart,/ The hand more instrumental to the

mouth,/ Than is the throne of Denmark to thy father.58

In doing so, furthermore, Claudius is not

only putting forth the crucial medieval notions of the kings two bodies, one natural and the other

mystical, he is emphasizing the particularities of the way this metaphor was employed in

Medieval England. As Ernst Kantorowicz explains in The Kings Two Bodies, in England not

the king alone, but the king jointly with lords and commons formed the mystical body of the

57Ibid.

58Ibid. 16


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realmthe king was merely the head in which the mystical or political body of the realm

culminated.59

So, in an address to the council from 1542, Henry VIII proclaimed:

We be informed by our judges that we at no time stand so highly in our estate royal as in

the time of Parliament, wherein we as head and you as members are conjoined and knit

together in one body politic.60

The political implications of this notion amounted to the affirmation, so much more important

in English political thought[that] head and body depended mutually on each other and that as

the king was supreme in some respects, so was the polity in others.61

This much is confirmed by

prince Hamlet when, responding ironically to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern on the topic of

ambition, he states: Then are our beggars bodies, and our monarchs and outstretched heroes but

the beggars shadows.62

Hamlets statement qualifies the image of the monarch, as that of a

hero whose reputation is outstretched by the people in a communal fiction. Similarly the

monarch represents the people in so much as the people accept the fiction of this representation

as legitimate. Thus the king is the shadow of our bodies, the shadow of the body politic. The

process of the creation of this fiction is explored by Hamlet when telling Rosencrantz, It is not

very strange, for mine uncle is King of Denmark, and those that would make mouths at him/

while my father lived, give twenty, forty, fity, an hunded/ ducats a-piece for his picture in

littlethere is something in this more than natural.63

It is, indeed, more than natural, it is

artificial.

59

Ernst Kantorowicz, 228. The Kings Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology(Princeton: PrincetonUniversity Press, 1997).60

Cited in Ibid. 228. Though, the 1559 bill brought before Parliament put forward the title for Elizabeth not as

supreme head of the Church of England but only of Supreme Governor. That's often seen as being a more

appropriate title for a woman, governor rather than head. Or else, one can imagine else all the dirty puns.

However, fighting the increasing demands of her council, she did state: "it is a strange thing that the foot should

direct the head in so weighty a matter."61

Ibid. 231. Kantorowicz thinks Nicholas of Cusa in his De Concodarntia Catholica is the originator of such notions

of dependency, though depending on ones reading of Machiavelli, he could easily be the originator of such a

notion.62

Shakespeare. 73.63

Ibid. 78


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Claudius is not oblivious to this; in fact, he is critically aware throughout the play of his

powers contingency upon the body politic. Figures continuously rise as threats to his

sovereignty. Even in the early stages of the play, as he sends Cornelius and Voltimad to see Old

Norway, Claudius reminds them he is Giving to you not further personal power/ To business

with the kind, more than the scope/ Of these delated articles allow.64

But more dangerously are

the charismatic figures of Denmark. First isHamlet, who is so popular65

that Claudius cannot kill

him directly and therefore sends him to England (so much, at least, he tells Laertes). Then there

is the popularity of Laertes who, in a riotous head[where] the rabble call him lord, at times

even crying, Laertes shall be king, Laertes king!

66

returns from France to avenge his own

father, and is upheld bypeople who in their thoughts and whispers blame Claudius For Good

Polonius death.67

Claudius had predicted so much, expressing concern as soon as Polonius

died that this would be blamed on him. As he tells Gertrude in that moment, we [must do

something so that the] haply slander,/ Whose whisper oer the worlds diameter,/ As level as the

cannon to his blank,/ transports his poisoned shot, may miss our name/ And hit the woundless

air.68 His brilliant use of rhetoric to slowly but assuredly turn Laertes attention towards Hamlet

is a political lesson in its own right.

The reversal however, that is, the representative aspect of the monarch whose behavior

comes to impact the entire body politic, is another important theme of the play. Prince Hamlet

draws this element out some moments before meeting the ghost of his father for the first time, as

him and Horatio are struck by the sound of trumpets. Explaining the meaning of this rite to

Horatio, Hamlet moves to complain on the real meaning behind such ornaments, Claudius

drunken binges. The way such actions impact the body politic is then drawn out: This heavy-

64

Ibid. 16.65

Shakespeare, 128.66

Ibid. 166-16767

Ibid.68

Ibid. 150


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headed revel east and west/ Makes us traduced and taxed of other nations./ They clepe us

drunkards/and indeed it takes/ From our achievements, though performed at height (by the

head, the king) [and] be they as pure as grace,/ As infinite as man may undergo - / Shall in the

general censure take corruption/ From that particular faults.69

No matter how much one is

virtuous in particular, the faults of the head of the body include one. Following this thread, the

religious behavior of Claudius has an impact upon the whole body politic too. The little we know

of it comes from the sections directly following the mouse-trap, as we find out that the ghost is

indeed no demon or fantasy, and that Claudius did indeed kill old King Hamlet. Standing alone,

his soliloquy runs:

O, my offence is rank, it smells to heaven,/ It hath theprimal eldest curse upont,/ A

brothers murder. Pray can I not,/ Though inclination be as sharp as will./ My stronger

guilt defeats my strong intent,/ And like a man to double business bound/ I stand in pause

where I shall first begin,/ And both neglect.70

Claudius stands more vulnerable than ever, and addresses the perils that thought creates for

action in a very similar manner than Hamlets earlier soliloquies. Claudius admits dissatisfaction

with his behavior in the face of his religious beliefs; he is the equal of Cain and does not know in

what way he can gain forgivenesshe does not even know how to begin asking for it. After all,

he reasons, how could I ask: Forgive me my foul murder?...[if] I am still possessed/ Of those

effects for which I did the murder,/ My crown, mine own ambition, and my queen./ May one be

pardoned and retain th offence?71

Aware of the hypocrisy in asking for forgiveness while still

latching onto the things he gained, and wanted to gain from the murder of his brother, Claudius

stands helpless. Though ultimately he does kneel and pray, the seriousness of the offence

remains.

69Ibid. 37.

70Ibi. 130.

71Ibid.130-131.


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The matter is intensified if we re-enter the English parallels. Claudius would then be the

head of the Church of England, the overseer ofThe Book of Common Prayer. His impact upon

the body politic would thus be coupled with his an impact on the Corpus Christi.72

To this extent

Denmark is affected both politically and religiously by the king, who has exerted such a sin as to

by every means leave Denmark churchless, so long as he is in power.

Part of the story of Purgatory that was developed in Christian dogma was one of a

community, a Corpus Christi that included both the living and the dead. In Denmark, such a

community has been wrought impossible, in as much as the headof this body is fallen. This is

yet another way in which one might speak ofHamletsportrayal of a village without a Church.

Hamletrises as a play about the corruptions of a community and the impossibility of a network

between living and living, as well as living and dead. The cause identified is the lack of

technologies that can mobilize grief into binding love. What is certain is that the bodypolitic and

the Corpus Christi are torn, and Claudius is indeed A king of shreds and patches.73

CONCLUSION: SCHMITTS EPOCHAL TRAGICITY

In Carlo Gallis reading of Schmitt, tragicity is not a genre or a trope, rather, it is a

way to gloss Schmitts attention to a certain rupture the concrete, epochal rupture of the origin

72Of course, theories of secularization have emphasized how both the notion ofpersona mystica, and ultimately of

persona repraesentata replaced the notion ofcorpus mysticum, which had by the twelfth century become the

equivalent of the earlier Pauline concept ofCorpus Christi. The Aristotelian notion ofcorpus morale et politicum

was revived and as a result of Aquinas, was made fitting with Christian dogma. After Aquinas had ecclesiasticized

the Philosopher, there remained no difficulty in combining Aristotelian concepts with ecclesiastical thought and

terminology. The extent of this identification in Elizabethan England remains, however, unknown, and formethodological reasons it remains useful to separate the two. As concerns Kantorowicz account, furthermore, it is

important to note that not only is Kantorowicz tremendously indebted to the theological work of Henri de Lubac,

Corpus Mysticum, but that he strategically misapprehends crucial elements of de Lubacs account as he argues

that the mystical steadily turns into the fiction in medieval political theology[In fact] De Lubacs interpretation of

the corpus mysticum as a dynamic paradox simultaneously transcendent and immanent offers a theological

perspective that elucidates the potential inadequacy of both the vertical orientation of Schmitts account of

sovereignty (as personal and transcendent) and Kantorowicz emphasis on horizontal bureaucracy as a mysticized

body politic Jennifer Rust, 104. Political Theologies of the Corpus Mysticum: Schmitt, Kantorowicz, and De

Lubac. Political Theology and Early Modernity. Ed. Graham Hammill (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2012).

73Ibid. 71.


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of modernity[and] the impossibility of giving an adequate name to this rupture.74

It is the

tension of being in-between the dying old world and the still birthing new world, and it is this

tragicity that, in all its inevitability, sheds forth inHamlet. Our return to history, and the

parallelisms established between the play and Elizabethan England, have attempted to show this

concreteness not in order to emphasize a reading of Schmitt that sees tragedy as historical

fact imbedded in fiction. But rather to bring up the confusing way in which history enters the

play without generating any synthesis, opening a trench of tensions. It is what Schmitt,

borrowing a phrase from Nicholas of Cusa, called the complexion oppositorum, where the

opposition is non-dialectical and non-relativist, but rather a form in which life and reason

coexist without forcing,75

which does not mean without struggling. What Schmitt finds as the

sources of the plays incomprehensibility is born from the unspeakability of this irruption of

the concrete, of seriousness, into play. But this silence is not merely on account of historical

pressures that politically prevent Shakespeare from saying what he would like to say. The

historical imposition upon the play does not function ideologically. Rather, as Galli has put it,

contemporary history is transcendental(in the Kantian sense) with respect to the drama itself as

well as to its internal logic.76

The words of the play remain distanced, merelyscarredby the irruption of time that it

encounters in an extra-linguistic dimension, i.e., the religious wars (Schmitt stops there) and the

cosmological confusion generated from them. The catastrophe between the destruction of old

meanings and the rise of new ones is still catastrophic inHamlet, and though one can make

sense of its world, impossibilities, contradictions, and confusions are an intrinsic part it. Hamlet

74Adam Sitze, 50-51. The Tragicity of the Political: A Note on Carlo Gallis Reading of Carl Schmitts Hamlet or

Hecuba. Political Theology and Early Modernity.75

Ibid. 51.76

Carlos Galli, 65. Hamlet: Representation and the Concrete. Trans. Adam Sitze and Amanda Minervini. Political

Theology and Early Modernity.


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is the name of characters who are involved in the fragmentation of community, in the inability

to assimilate cosmology and institutions, to transform mourning into love, to bind the living and

the dead, and as a consequence remain isolated, the only inhabitants of their own individual

worlds. It is in this sense, more than in the strong sense of an Anglican world without resource to

Purgatory, that the Hamlet characters mirror a village without a church.

this is i, hamlet the dane

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