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Sebastian Morales-Bermudez Reading Hamlet Simon Critchley December 19, 2012

This is I, Hamlet the Dane

The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark is thought to be based on an older AngloSaxon play called Amleth. 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-princeson. But going back the Germanic ham (home), and entering Middle English as hamelet, a hamlet since 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 hamlet as 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 Shakespeares Hamlet is Elizabethan England. From the paranoid world of spies that killed Marlowe, to the orchestrations of the Privy

1 2

Online Etymology Dictionary. There 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.

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 Denmark shines 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 that Hamlet is 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, Addicted3 is Laertes in France; Claudius order to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to find out the reason for Hamlet s 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 tensions between 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 of body 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,
3

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

my lord,/ or to the dreadful summit of the cliff/ That beetles 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.4 The 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 of Hamlet ails 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 of liturgical 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
4

Ibid. 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

4 Parliament, what was often described as 'the religion by law established'. But that religion was 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 nature and the extent of that Protestantism.7

In Hamlet this 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 in Hamlet, 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 con ception 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 a reckoning10 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

7 8

From Keith Wrightnons lectures at Yale. See www.opencourses.com Ibid. 42. 9 Ibid. 42. 10 Ibid. 46 11 Ibid. 45.

King Hamlets purgation. On the Anglican side, t he 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 in due time to the Curateor by any other just impediment, do not receive the Sacrament 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 savior Christe, 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 11th 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

12

Article XXII of the Anglican Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion states that "The Romish Doctrine concerning Purgatoryis a fond thing, vainly invented, and grounded upon no warranty of Scripture, but rather repugnant to the 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 in 1570.

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 of Hamlet. 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 a m 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 is pale and uneffectual. In another sense, it is only too fitting that the image of Purgatory drawn out in Hamlet 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

14

Jacques 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.

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 in Hamlet: 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 individual through liturgical means 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 prominent practice 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 a state of being: purgation, since at least Augustine), it would not become concretized until the 1 3th 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
18 19

Le Goff. 357. Ibid. 125. 20 This is Le Goffs general thesis. His evidence is very good.

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 13 th 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 aid in 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 had pariage 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

21 22

Ibid. 135. Cited in Ibid. 248. This was by no means the only position in the 12th C., 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.

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.

26 27

Ibid. 254. Emphasis added. Ibid. 266 28 Cited in Ibid. 275 29 Ibid. 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 if Hamlet provides 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 of a 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,
30 31

Shakespeare, 127 Ibid. 200 32 Ibid. 183. 33 The rejection of Papal authority was crucial for the Elizabethan Queendom. As professor Wrightson remarks: Elizabeth was Anne 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.35 In 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 shape yea, 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

35 36

Ibid. 26. Ibid. 38 37 The 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 Hamlet cannot be taken as a further sign of Catholicism. See Joad Raymond. Protestant Culture: Miltons Angels. History Today. Vol 60. Issue 12, 2012. 38 Ibid. 91 39 Ibid. 91 40 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 phantasms imaged 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 of ones own imaginings (so perhaps a Dostoesvskian hell, or a Tibetan Buddhist hell?).
41 42

Ibid. 50. Ibid. 75 43 Ibid. 20 44 Ibid. 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 as part 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 precisely because 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 doctor for, for me to put him to his
45 46

Ibid. 89 Ibid. 88 47 Ibid. 132. 48 Ibid. 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 being of 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
49 50

Ibid. 122. Ibid. 123 51 Ibid. 154-155. 52 Ibid. 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 w here 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,
53 54

Ibid. 19 Ibid. 201 55 Ibid. 56 Ibid.

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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
57 58

Ibid. Ibid. 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: Princeton University 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 is Hamlet, 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 by people 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 heavy64 65

Ibid. 16. Shakespeare, 128. 66 Ibid. 166-167 67 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 the primal 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 forgiveness he 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.

69 70

Ibid. 37. Ibi. 130. 71 Ibid.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 of The 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 head of this body is fallen. This is yet another way in which one might speak of Hamlets portrayal of a village without a Church. Hamlet rises 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 body politic 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 t rope, rather, it is a way to gloss Schmitts attention to a certain rupture the concrete, epochal rupture of the origin
72

Of course, theories of secularization have emphasized how both the notion of persona mystica, and ultimately of persona repraesentata replaced the notion of corpus mysticum, which had by the twelfth century become the equivalent of the earlier Pauline concept of Corpus Christi. The Aristotelian notion of corpus 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 for methodological 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 accou nt 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).
73

Ibid. 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 in Hamlet. 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, merely scarred by 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 in Hamlet, and though one can make sense of its world, impossibilities, contradictions, and confusions are an intrinsic part it. Hamlet

74

Adam 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.