Hamlet and the Altars

Elizabeth Watson reads Hamlet through the lens of Eamon Duffy’s classic “stripping of the altars” thesis.  In the play, altars are replaced by tables, the arras, the bed, and the stage spectacle takes the place of Catholic liturgical spectacle: “it is not the specific theology but the way in which change is negotiated that matters in Hamlet. Prince Hamlet must negotiate between the old and the new in many ways, religion being only one of them, and verbal playfulness is a part of this back-and-forth movement. Shakespeare deftly suggests a number of religious positions without really endorsing any of them; yet what is not clear is whether secularization is being embraced or questioned in the play. In the urban spaces outside the playhouses, secular ritual, decorative structures, and national myths shaped Lon don’s open-air ceremonials. While the religious establishment’s iconoclasm was being countered by the civic establishment’s determined secularization of ritual, the stage served as an unofficial and unsanctioned site for the same process. The movement from Roman Catholic religious spectacle to Elizabethan theatrical spectacle was another form of iconoclastic displacement necessary to the effective functioning of Protestant religious practice, which also resembles the shifts and suppressions.”

There is a parody of the Catholic ritual in some scenes, she thinks, but the parody may express the longing of Protestant England for its traditional Catholic rites, now maimed by Reformation:

“two scenes parody the Mass: the dumb show and the final scene with the chalice of wine. In both scenes, a vessel is elevated; in both, poison replaces the symbolic blood of Christ.The Protestants emptied ritual of any sense of mystery and real presence but without draining the sacred symbols and practices entirely of their power to structure thought and response; therefore, the dumb show, although still recognizable as parody to the audience, can be viewed as Protestant parody of a rite now attributed to belief in the magic of transubstantiation instead of serving merely as a sign or mnemonic device. As remembered signs, the dumb show and final scene evoke religious overtones of the Mass, but the dumb show also commemorates the taking of Hamlet’s father in a garden, an act ofJudas like treachery. In the final scene, the unction with which Laertes daubs his sword (4.7.113) becomes both the last rite for, and the cause of, Hamlet’s death; that is, ‘As Laertes earlier said he was prepared to do, he and Claudius thus contrive a way to cut Hamlet’s throat in the church,; a place once accepted as a domain of sanctuary. The play on union links the pearl in the cup both to Holy Communion and to the incestuous union of Gertrude and Claudius. Given this context, the sound of the words, ‘And in the cup an union shall he throw’ (5.2.210), may represent a play on the word communion. The multiple implications of words in this scene suggest that Claudius may take on the role of Antichrist and that the ‘chalice is like the gold cup borne by the Whore of Babylon’; or the parodic elements can be compared to a Black Mass or to a macabre anti-Communion, with first Claudius as priest and then Hamlet functioning as the devil’s priest.”

David Kaula reads the play in almost the opposite direction.  Kaula too sees a parody of the mass in the final scene, but thinks that the play tilts in a Protestant direction:  “The duel as a ‘brother’s wager’ suggests the Cain and Abel motif once again, with Hamlet replacing his father as Claudius’s opposite and as the victim of treacherous poisoning. Hence the two antithetical figures of the earlier apocalyptic speeches are no longer merely pre-sented in static visionary form but are embodied and acted out. Claudius plays the role of Antichrist by preparing the duel as a kind of sacrificial ritual equipped with sacramental objects: Laertes’ lethal ‘unction,’ the poisoned ‘chalice,’ and the ‘table prepared’ with ‘stoups of wine.’ The ritual of the duel resembles the mass as the Protestant writers describe it, a mere ‘masquery or stage play,’ full of ostentatious ceremony but spiritually deadly.  Claudius’s chalice is like the gold cup borne by the Whore of Babylon (Rev. 17:4), generally interpreted as representing the outwardly impressive but spiritually lethal doctrines and sacraments of the Catholic Church.”