Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Christmas at Elsinore

2008; Oxford University Press; Volume: 58; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/escrit/cgn015

1471-6852

Peter McCullough,

Byzantine Studies and History

DISCUSSIONS OF RELIGION in Hamlet have been disproportionately concerned with two things. The first is the supernatural status of the Ghost, a question perhaps as unanswerable now as the first time Hamlet posed it in triplicate: ‘Be thou a spirit of health or goblin damned, / Bring with thee airs from heaven or blasts from hell, / Be thy intents wicked or charitable … I will speak to thee’.1 The second is the degree and nature of predestinarianism implied by Hamlet's gloss on a short parable from Matthew (10: 29), ‘There is special providence in the fall of a sparrow’ (V. ii. 197-8). Compelling though these questions are in their own right, they have dominated critical enquiry because to answer them is to align the play – and Shakespeare – with one side or the other along a confessional divide: an infernal Ghost and a Calvinist sparrow make Hamlet a Protestant play; a benign Ghost and Stoic sparrow, a Catholic one. However, the impulse to define the play as either broadly Catholic or broadly Protestant flies in the face of its own relentless effort to assert both possibilities in a dramaturgical process that cancels the signifying power of each. Hamlet's Denmark is confessionally schizophrenic, and deliberately so; Calvinist buzzwords like ‘special providence’ come from the mouth of one who also swears by St Patrick yet studied in Wittenberg. Juxtaposed religious allusions like these intensify the play's world of religious paralysis, in which spirits are ‘wicked or charitable’, prayers do not ‘fly up’, and rites are ‘maimed’ (I. iv. 42, III. iii. 97, V. i. 208). Hamlet can be seen as a poignant, and therefore nostalgic and conservative, lament for the loss at the Reformation of a world of ecclesiastical and epistemological certainties. Alternatively, one could argue for a far more sceptical tragedy that scorns any fond religious hopes of such certainties.