Edition: HamletReligion and Philosophy

Ambrose

Saint Ambrose, 337–397 CE, theologian.

Angels

Para1Angels are portrayed as opposites to the devil in a cosmic struggle for souls. The Ghost, vividly describing the enormous difference between virtue and vice, observes the way in which lust, though to a radiant angel linked, / Will sate itself in a celestial bed / And prey on garbage (5).
Para2When Hamlet exhorts his mother to reform her life, he speaks of the monster custom that too often leads us astray into sinful habits, but nonetheless can be angel yet in this by teaching us the use of actions fair and good (4). He speaks of a similar opposition earlier when he apostrophizes humankind as noble in reason, In action, how like an angel! In apprehension, how like a god, and yet somehow achieving nothing more finally than to be a quintessence of / dust (2). Claudius is no less aware of this cosmic struggle between good and evil when he implores, Help, angels! to assist him in his flawed attempt to pray (3).
Hamlet speaks of a cherub that sees into our purposes (3).
Laertes angrily asserts that his dead sister Ophelia will be A minist’ring angel when the churlish priest denying her full Christian burial will lie howling in hell (1).
Horatio, overcoming his skepticism, prays that flights of angels will sing the dead Hamlet to his eternal rest (2).
See Devil.

Apostle’s Creed

Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust

Para3When Hamlet, asked by Rosencrantz what he has done with the dead body of Polonius, replies, Compounded it with dust, whereto ’tis kin (2), he echoes a verse from Genesis 3:19: because thou art dust, and to dust shalt thou return. The phrase was well known from its inclusion in the Anglican Order for the Burial of the Dead in The Book of Common Prayer: we commit his body to the ground; earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. The phrasing is based on God’s sentencing of Adam and Eve as they are expelled from the Garden of Eden: thou art dust, and to dust shalt thou return (Genesis 3:19).
Para4Hamlet reflects again on this truism when he asks, in conversation with Horatio, Why may not imagination trace the noble dust of Alexander till ’a find it stopping a bunghole? (A5 Sc1 Sp82). He expatiates further: Alexander was buried, Alexander returneth into dust, the dust is earth, of earth we make loam, and why of that loam whereto he was converted might they not stop a beer-barrel? (1).
Earlier, Hamlet has been bidden by his mother, Do not forever with thy vailèd lids / Seek for thy noble father in the dust (2).
In conversation with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Hamlet characterizes the human animal as a quintessence of / dust (2).

Augustine

Saint Augustine of Hippo (Algeria), 354–430 CE, Christian theologian and philosopher.

Book of Common Prayer

The Anglican service book for daily prayer.
Hamlet alludes to it when he uses the phrase pickers and stealers (2); the Catechism from the Book of Common Prayer enjoins worshipers to vow to keep my hands from picking and stealing.
When Hamlet, asked what he has done with the dead body of Polonius, replies, Compounded it with dust, whereto ’tis kin (2), he echoes the phrase from the Book of Common Prayer, we commit his body to the ground; earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

Biblical References

Para5Genesis 1:10–25, 2:19–20: On the story of God’s creating the world and then bidding Adam name all living creatures, compare A3 Sc1, where Hamlet says accusingly to Ophelia, you […] nickname God’s creatures (1). On Adam as the original gardener and ditch-digger, see 1.
Para6Genesis 2:24: Therefore shall man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave to his wife, and they shall be one flesh. Compare Hamlet, when he bids farewell to his mother and is forcefully reminded by Claudius that he has a loving father too: My mother. Father and mother is man and wife, man and wife is one flesh (3). See also Matthew 19:5–6 and Mark 10:8.
Para7Genesis 3:1–16: For the story of the serpent’s temptation of Eve and the consequent banishment of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, compare Claudius’s allusion at A1 Sc2 to the first corpse resulting from the first murder on Earth of Abel by his brother Cain (2).
Para8Genesis 3:19: because thou art dust, and to dust shalt thou return. Compare Hamlet’s meditation on how the decayed body of the dead Emperor Alexander might be made into loam and thus used to stop a beer-barrel (1). At A1 Sc2, Hamlet is bid by his mother: Do not forever with thy vailèd lids / Seek for thy noble father in the dust (2). When Hamlet is asked what he has done with the dead body of Polonius, he replies: Compounded it with dust, whereto ’tis kin (2). See also Hamlet’s characterization of humankind as a quintessence of dust (2). See also Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust.
Para9Genesis 4:1–16: For the story of Cain’s slaying of Abel, compare Claudius’s From the first corpse till he that died today (2), and Claudius at prayer, saying of his act of murdering his brother: It hath the primal eldest curse upon’t, / A brother’s murder (3). At A5 Sc1, Hamlet compares a skull to Cain’s jawbone, that did the first murder (1). The account in Genesis does not actually mention a jawbone, but the association was traditional.
Para10Leviticus 18:16: Thou shalt not discover the shame of thy brother’s wife, and 20:21: So the man that taketh his brother’s wife, committeth filthiness. Compare A1 Sc2, where Hamlet laments his mother’s most wicked speed, to post / With such dexterity to incestuous sheets! (2). See also Incest, Incestuous.
Para11Psalm 92:12: The righteous shall flourish like a palm tree. Compare Hamlet’s quotation from the King’s commission to the King of England to kill Hamlet: As love between them like the palm should flourish (2).
Para12Psalm 144:4: Man is like to vanity; his days are like a shadow that vanisheth. Compare Hamlet’s The King is a thing […] Of nothing (2–2).
Para13Isaiah 1:15–18: I will not hear: for your hands are full of blood. Wash you, make you clean, take away the evil of your works from before mine eyes […] though your sins were as crimson, they shall be made white as snow. Compare Claudius in prayer: What if this cursèd hand / Were thicker than itself with brother’s blood, / Is there not rain enough in the sweet heavens / To wash it white as snow? (3).
Para14Ezekiel 16:49: Behold, this was the iniquity of thy sister Sodom, pride, fullness of bread and abundance of idleness. See A3 Sc3, where Hamlet soliloquizes, ’A took my father grossly, full of bread (3).
Para15Matthew 2:2: For the story of Herod’s ordering the Massacre of the Innocents, see Herod and Termagant. Compare Act 3, Scene 2 , where Hamlet complaining of exaggerated acting that out-Herods Herod (2).
Para16Matthew 6:28-30: Compare 5.2, where Hamlet’s reflections on a special providence bring to mind Christ’s parable about the lilies of the field that grow as God has provided (A5 Sc2 Sp77). Compare Luke 12:27–28 and see Calvin, John.
Para17Matthew 10:29: Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing, and one of them shall not fall on the ground without your Father? Compare Hamlet’s There’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow, (2). See also Luke 12:27–28 and Calvin, John.
Para18Matthew 19:5–6: For this cause, shall a man leave father and mother, and cleave unto his wife, etc. Compare Hamlet, when he bids farewell to his mother and is forcefully reminded by Claudius that he has a loving father too: My mother. Father and mother is man and wife, man and wife is one flesh (3). See also Genesis 2:24 and Mark 10:8.
Para19Matthew 24:29: And immediately after the tribulations of those days shall the sun be darkened, and the moon shall not give her light, and the stars shall fall from heaven, and the powers of heaven shall be shaken. Compare Horatio’s description of the frightening omens seen shortly before the assassination of Julius Caesar: stars with trains of fire and dews of blood, / Disasters in the sun; and the moist star, / Upon whose influence Neptune’s empire stands, / Was sick almost to doomsday with eclipse (1). See also Revelation 6:12.
Para20Mark 10:8: And they twain shall be one flesh. Compare Hamlet, when he bids farewell to his mother and is forcefully reminded by Claudius that he has a loving father too: My mother. Father and mother is man and wife, man and wife is one flesh (3). See also Genesis 2:24 and Matthew 19:5–6.
Para21Luke 12:27–28: Consider the lilies how they grow: they labor not, neither spin they: yet I say unto you, that Solomon himself in all his royalty was not clothed like one of these, etc. Compare Hamlet’s There’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow (2). See also Matthew 10:29 and Calvin, John.
Para22John 11: See Leprosy.
Para23Acts of the Apostles 10:42: And he commanded us to preach unto the people, and to testify, that it is he that is ordained of God a judge of quick and dead. Compare A5 Sc1, where Laertes, at Ophelia’s gravesite, bids his hearers to pile your dust upon the quick and dead (1). See also 2 Timothy 4:1 and Quick and the Dead.
Para241 Corinthians 15:22: See Original Sin.
Para252 Timothy 4:1: Charge thee therefore before God, and before the Lord Jesus Christ, which shall judge the quick and dead at that his appearing, and in his kingdom. Compare A5 Sc1, where Laertes, at Ophelia’s gravesite, bids his hearers to pile your dust upon the quick and dead (1). See also Acts of the Apostles and Quick and the Dead.
Para261 Peter 4:5: See Quick and the Dead.
Para27Revelation 6:12: and lo, there was a great earthquake, and the Sun was as black sackcloth of hair, and the Moon was like blood. Compare Horatio’s description of the frightening omens seen shortly before the assassination of Julius Caesar: stars with trains of fire and dews of blood, / Disasters of the sun; and the moist star, / Upon whose influence Neptune’s empire stands, / Was sick almost to doomsday with eclipse (1). See also Matthew 24:29.

Cain and Abel

Para28When Claudius cites the first corpse till he that died today at 2, he encompasses the entire sweep of history, from Cain’s murder of his brother Abel (Genesis 3:1–16) down to the present moment.
Para29Abel was a keeper of sheep, Cain a tiller of the ground. Cain slew Abel out of envy that Abel prospered and enjoyed the Lord’s respect, while Cain did not. Presumably this crime was a consequence of Adam and Eve’s having been banished from Eden for having disobeyed the Lord’s command that they not eat the fruit of the tree in the midst of the garden; it was the first crime in human history, taking the form of the murder of a brother. For this grave offense, the Lord set a mark on Cain and decreed that he was to be a fugitive and a vagabond, unable to yield any sustenance from the land.
Para30Apparently Claudius in A1 Sc2 does not recognize, or at any rate does not admit, the fateful resemblance between Cain’s crime of fratricide and Claudius’s own murder of his brother, though perhaps we are invited to speculate that this reference to Cain has emerged almost unconsciously from Claudius’s inner awareness of guilt. Later, at A3 Sc3, when Claudius makes a futile attempt to pray to God for mercy, he does acknowledge that my offense is rank, that It smells to heaven, and that It hath the primal eldest curse upon’t, / A brother’s murder (3).
Para31In A5 Sc1, Hamlet is reminded of Cain’s jawbone, that did the first murder! (1), alluding to a long medieval tradition that Cain committed this dreadful act with a jawbone of an ass. (The account in Genesis says nothing of a jawbone or any other weapon.) It is called a cheke-bon in the Towneley Mactatio Abel (The Murder of Abel line 326).
Para32The story of Cain and Abel is thus the great archetype in human history of fratricide. As such it hangs heavy over the play of Hamlet. The story also turns up meaningfully in Richard II, when the new King Henry IV, having suggested that someone rid him of this living fear? of Richard II by doing away with him (R2 5.4.2), condemns Sir Pierce of Exton for acting on the suggestion, saying to him, With Cain go wander through the shades of night (R2 5.6.43). Clearly the audience is to understand that King Henry himself most deserves to be compared with Cain, not only because the King has incited Exton to act but also because the victimized Richard II was the new King’s first cousin; the assassination was in effect another fratricide.
Para33Fratricide and attempted fratricide are particularly heinous crimes in Shakespeare’s plays, for example, Duke Frederick’s attempt to destroy Duke Senior in As You Like It (5.4.136–140), Richard III’s devious way of ordering the execution of his brother George Duke of Clarence, Edmund’s homicidal plotting against Edgar in King Lear, and Antonio’s dispatching his brother Prospero out to sea in an unseaworthy vessel in The Tempest. Don John’s deep animus against Don Pedro in Much Ado About Nothing is not quite fratricide, but is nonetheless seriously malicious. Critics don’t know quite what to do with the fact that Shakespeare himself had a younger brother named Edmund.

Calvin, John

Para34Calvin, 1509–1564, was a famous theologian whose teachings exerted an important influence over English reformist ministers, many of whom lived in exile in Calvin’s Geneva during the years of Queen Mary’s Catholic reign in England, 1553–1558. Returning to a Protestant England under Queen Elizabeth I, they established themselves in many churches and were a dominant voice especially at Cambridge University in the last decades of the sixteenth century.
Para35His followers expounded Calvin’s view of Providence in which God’s ever-present hand wills not only all events, but each event. Since God was and is all-powerful and ever-present in human history, and since he knows all things that are and will be, he must be understood to predestine all that will happen. Grace is his gift without which salvation is impossible. Grace is his to give to some and not to others; we cannot question his wisdom in this. It follows from this that some humans are predestinately damned. The failure in this is the fault of the sinful person, and yet the failure is predetermined.
Para36Hamlet seems deeply informed in these theological ideas, especially when he says to Horatio that There’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ’tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come (2).
Para37Elsewhere, too, Hamlet seems inclined to think in Calvinist terms, as when he contrasts his own father and Claudius as types of what Calvin would call the saved and the reprobate; see for example 2 and 4. And, I am myself indifferent honest, he says to Ophelia, but yet I could accuse me of such things that it were better my mother had not borne me […] We are arrant knaves, all; believe none of us (1).
Para38These are commonplaces of medieval theology, found plentifully in Augustine and other church fathers, but Calvin gave to these ideas a new prominence and insistency that was integrally a part of Anglican theology in the sixteenth century.
Para39Favorite biblical texts included Matthew 10:29: Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing, and one of them shall not fall on the ground without your father? See also Matthew 6:28-30: Learn how the Lilies of the field do grow: they are not wearied, neither spin […] Wherefore if God so clothe the grass of the field which is today, and tomorrow is cast into the oven, shall he not do much more unto you, O ye of little faith? Luke 12:27-28 is closely similar.

Devil

Para40When he first sees his father’s Ghost, Hamlet prays Angels and ministers of grace defend us! since Hamlet cannot be sure if the spirit he beholds is a spirit of health or goblin damned. Does this spirit bring with him airs from heaven or blasts from hell? Are his intents wicked or charitable (4)?
Para41Hamlet worries again at A2 Sc2 that the spirit that he has seen May be the devil. The devil, he knows, has power T’assume a pleasing shape, and might well be supposed to lie and wait for the soul of one like Hamlet who suffers from weakness and melancholy; the devil is very potent with such spirits and may intend to abuse Hamlet this way as a means of damning his soul (2). Hamlet’s deep knowledge of Christian teaching makes him aware that to be led astray in an act of murder by the devil in masquerade would be to condemn Hamlet’s own soul to eternal damnation. This reasoning is sometimes dismissed as rationalization by critics who emphasize Hamlet’s morbid delaying of the task he has been assigned by his father, but Renaissance lore about devils gives plentiful support to Hamlet’s reasons for caution.
Para42Elsewhere in the play, the devil is credited with enormous powers of deception and subterfuge. When Polonius reflects on ways in which frail humans too often use devotion’s visage / And pious action to sugar o’er / The devil himself, Claudius, talking to himself, readily agrees that the observation is too true in pointing out Claudius’s own terrible hypocrisy (1–1).
Para43Hamlet speaks of the devil as wearing black (2). He asks his mother, What devil was’t / That thus hath cozened you at hoodman-blind? (4). Custom or habit is to Hamlet the very devil in us leading us into frightful ways that can be countered only by an angel teaching us good habits. Laertes, furious about the death of his father, swears To hell, allegiance! Vows, to the blackest devil! (5). The devil take thy soul! he adjures Hamlet when they encounter each other at Ophelia’s grave (1).
Para44Repeatedly, the devil is associated with the ferocious spirit of revenge, and the dangers of following the promptings of such feelings are apparent.

Charles V, Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire

Doomsday, Apocalypse

Para45The widespread belief that doomsday was near in human history was based substantially on the book of Revelation, traditionally the last book of the New Testament, envisaging the final destruction of the world as a time of final reckoning when God’s ultimate purposes are to be revealed.
Horatio speaks of the assassination of Julius Caesar as a time when the moon was sick almost to doomsday with eclipse (1).
When Rosencrantz offers a novel bit of news that the world’s grown honest, Hamlet quips, Then is doomsday near (2).
Para46The sense of apocalyptic disaster hangs over the play, as it does in King Lear. Hamlet invokes an image of apocalypse when he arraigns his mother for her infidelity to her first marriage: Heaven’s face doth glow / O’er this solidity and compound mass / With tristful visage, as against the doom (4), suggesting that the visage of heaven glows reproachfully in red-hot anger against the seemingly solid Earth that is about to experience the day of doom. The First Gravedigger speaks of graves as houses that last till doomsday (1).

Edict of Worms

Para47When Hamlet alludes to A certain convocation of politic worms that are presumably devouring Polonius’s dead body, and speaks of such worms as your only emperor for diet (3), some scholars see an allusion to the Imperial Diet (i.e., Assembly) of Worms. It was a celebrated convocation of the Holy Roman Empire assembled in the Heylshof Garden, Worms, Germany, on 28 January 1521, to inquire into and to condemn as heretical many of the 95 theses or propositions that Martin Luther had posted on the door of the Schlosskirche in Wittenberg on 31 October 1517, generally seen as the first salvo of the Protestant Reformation. The Emperor Charles V presided over the diet.
Para48In the previous year, Pope Leo X had issued a papal bull identifying some 41 errors in Luther’s pronouncements.

Herod and Termagant

Termagant was an imaginary deity, often paired in medieval texts with Mahound or Mohammed; both could be boisterously comic in their ranting against and persecuting Christians.
Herod displays similar antics in biblical plays when he orders the Slaughter of the Innocents after Christ’s birth, and then when he examines Christ after the arrest in the Garden of Gethsemane.
Shakespeare might have seen biblical plays near Stratford, even though the great cycles were being closed down by the Protestant authorities. Certainly these images of comic bluster were familiar in the culture of the time, as a way of ridiculing figures of demonic power like Satan himself and Antichrist.
Hamlet cites both Herod and Termagant in his advice to the players as instances of overacting, 2.

Incest, Incestuous

See Incest, Incestuous in Tales, Customs, and Learning. See also Leviticus 18:6–18.

Lenten Entertainment

Leo X, Pope

Luther, Martin

Original Sin

Para49When Hamlet encounters Ophelia after his To be, or not to be soliloquy (A3 Sc1 Sp19), he begins by saying to her, Nymph, in thy orisons / Be all my sins remembered (1), thereby asking her to pray for him in his sinful state.
Para50Medieval Christian theology held that all humans, after the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, were inveterately sinful and thus wholly in need of God’s mercy through the sacrifice of his son Jesus Christ. Hamlet alludes to this idea again in 3.1 when he says angrily to Ophelia, We are arrant knaves, all; believe none of us, meaning, in his we, all males and even all humans (1). Later, the Queen refers to sin’s true nature as it speaks to her sick soul (5). Earlier, the Ghost describes how, by being murdered, he was Cut off even in the blossoms of my sin (5).
Para51The concept of original sin, first introduced in the second century CE, was further developed by Augustine on the basis especially of Paul’s epistles to the Romans (5:12–21) and 1 Corinthians (15:22). Tertullian, Ambrose, Luther, and Calvin are some other important exponents of the concept.

Purgatory

Para52The Ghost’s description of his prison house where he is 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 is an apt representation of purgatory as it was understood in Shakespeare’s day (5).
Para53According to the doctrine of The Roman Catholic Church, purgatory was an intermediate state after the death of the body designed to purify the soul of any sinfulness, other than deadly sinfulness of an unforgiveable nature, not yet atoned for through contrition, confession, satisfaction, and the forgiveness of sins while the person was still living. Purgatory was thus a place of punishment for the general sinfulness to which all humans are prone in daily life: pride, envy, wrath, covetousness, gluttony, sloth, and lechery.
Para54Even an essentially good man like the King Hamlet must atone for these failings in purgatory if he dies without receiving last rites.
Para55As explained in A1 Sc5 in Hamlet, purgatory applies with vivid aptness to the situation of Hamlet’s father, who, as he tells Hamlet, was Cut off even in the blossoms of my sin, / Unhouseled, disappointed, unaneled, / No reck’ning made, but sent to my account / With all my imperfections on my head (5). These terms are from Catholic practice: to have been Unhouseled means to have died without receiving the housel or sacramental host of consecrated bread and wine; to have been disappointed is to have been unprepared, without time for deathbed confession; to have been unaneled is not to have been anointed with the holy oil of extreme unction. Purgatory was thus conceived of as a place of unspeakable torment, but invested with a purifying purpose and not a place of eternal damnation.
Para56Dante’s Purgatorio, coming between the Inferno and Paradiso in the triadic structure of The Divine Comedy (early fourteenth century), is a prime source of images of the afterlife as understood in medieval Europe.
Para57The Protestant Reformation no longer gave to purgatory the status of official recognition, but the idea remained widespread.
Para58At Act 3, Scene 3 , Hamlet resolves not to kill the King at prayer, lest this would be to take him in the purging of his soul, / When he is fit and seasoned for his passage (3), that is, when the King is cleansing himself of sin by penitential prayer and thereby preparing his soul for salvation if he were to die at this point.
See also Revenge and Saint Patrick.

Quick and the Dead

Para59This is from the Nicene and Apostles’s Creeds: He ascended into heaven, And sitteth on the right hand of God the Father Almighty; From thence he shall come to judge the quick the living and the dead. It originates in Acts 10:42 (where Christ is ordained of God a judge of quick and dead), 2 Timothy 4:1, and 1 Peter 4:5.
Para60Laertes, having leaped into Ophelia’s grave, bids the mourners at her funeral, Now pile your dust upon the quick and dead (1). Hamlet replies in kind: Be buried quick with her, and so will I (1). Earlier, Hamlet has said to the Gravedigger, who has talked of Ophelia’s grave as if it were her own: ’Tis for the dead, not for the quick (1), to which the Gravedigger has his quick retort: ’Tis a quick lie, sir; ’twill away again from me to you (A5 Sc1 Sp45).

Quintessence

Quintessence, i.e, “fifth essense” in medieval philosophy was essentially a distillation of the traditional four elements of earth, air, fire, and water, thereby providing a perfect example of some quality of class of things.
In cosmic terms quintessence was ether, the supposed essence out of which the heavenly bodies were made. These ideas go back to Aristotle, who saw ether as permeating all creation.
The medical authority Galen, who lived in the second century CE in Pergamon on the Aegean coast of Asia Minor, was widely associated with this theory of the four humors down into the time of the Renaissance. In his analysis of human physiology, the four elements produced in turn the four humors, sanguine (hot and moist), choleric (hot and dry), phlegmatic (cold and dry), and melancholy (cold and moist).
Hamlet, at A2 Sc2, describes the human animal as a quintessence of dust (2).

Saint Patrick

Para61This fifth-century Christian missionary and bishop was, according to popular Irish legend, the keeper of purgatory. Station Island, or perhaps Saints Island, in Lough Derg, County Donegal, was long venerated as the site where Christ had revealed to Saint Patrick a cave or pit in the ground named purgatory that the saint could then show to Irish folk of wavering faith as a substantial demonstration of the truth of Christian teaching about the joys of heaven and the torments of hell. This place then became a pilgrimage site.
Para62Perhaps Hamlet’s adjuring by Saint Patrick is meant to remind the listener or reader of purgatory (5), since that idea is so prominent earlier in the same scene, but Saint Patrick was also, in more general terms, a very popular figure associated with England as well as Ireland. This is the only time in all his writings that Shakespeare invokes the saint’s name in an oath like this.
Para63Friar Patrick’s cell is incidentally mentioned thrice as a place of meeting (in Italy, presumably) in The Two Gentlemen of Verona.

Suicide

Para64The First Gravedigger in A5 Sc1 is curious to know if Ophelia is to be given a Christian burial, in view of the suspicion that she took her own life. His companion replies that she is to be given a Christian burial, since the crowner or coroner has sat on her and has found it Christian burial (1).
Para65The further debate of these two clownish characters reveals what is at stake: if Ophelia drowned herself wittingly, that would be a suicidal act (1). The coroner has ruled against suicide, but the Gravedigger’s assistant suspects that If this had not been a gentlewoman, she should have been buried out o’Christian burial (1), that is, not ceremoniously laid to rest in the churchyard. The priest who officiates at the burial of Ophelia confirms much of this: Her obsequies have been as far enlarged / As we have warrantise. Her death was doubtful, / And, but that great command o’ersways the order, / She should in ground unsanctified have lodged / Till the last trumpet. For charitable prayers, / Shards, flints, and pebbles should be thrown on her; / Yet here she is allowed her virgin crants, / Her maiden strewments, and the bringing home / Of bell and burial (A5 Sc1 Sp88). She is, then, to be buried in the churchyard, and her grave is not to be desecrated by throwing of shards, flints, and pebbles, but other ceremonies are to be left out. The omissions are enough to enfuriate Laertes, and clearly do extend to the leaving out of sage requiem and such rest to her / As to peace-parted souls (1).
Para66The Queen’s moving description of Ophelia’s seemingly accidental death by drowning doesn’t sound like an account of a suicide to our ears: the young woman reportedly was attempting to hang her crownet weeds on a branch which then the branch broke, so that down her weedy trophies and herself / Fell in the weeping brook (A4 Sc7 Sp37). She then floated for a while, mermaid-like, but not long. She made no attempt to save herself, but, the Queen reports, acted like one incapable of her own distress (7).
Para67Why the Queen and her ladies apparently make no attempt to come to Ophelia’s rescue is a matter that is not explained; some later pictorial illustrations of this event place the Queen and her ladies on the opposite side of a sizable stream, but this is speculation. The passage is a set piece of magnificent poetry, and it is given to the Queen as one who can report the incident with genuine sorrow and dismay.
Para68Suicide was regarded in medieval and Renaissance times as the most grievous of sins. Archetypically, it was the sin of Judas Escariot, whose selling of Christ for thirty pieces of silver was terrible enough, but not as heinous as the suicide by hanging that followed. The mortal offense here, and for any suicide, was that it cuts off any chance of repentance; it severs the sinner eternally from any hope of salvation.
Para69Hamlet, in his first soliloquy, beginning Oh, that this too too solid flesh, wishes unhappily that the Everlasting had not fixed / His canon ’gainst self-slaughter (2), the implication being that Hamlet, deeply depressed about his father’s sudden death and his mother’s precipitate remarriage, would take his own life were not suicide so stringently forbidden.
Para70In his famous To be, or not to be soliloquy (A3 Sc1 Sp19), Hamlet ponders how anyone like himself could possibly choose to endure Th’oppressor's wrong, the proud man’s contumely, and all the rest When he himself might his quietus make / With a bare bodkin (1). The absolute deterrent is the dread of something after death that makes us rather bear those ills we have / Than fly to others that we know not of (1).
Para71Earlier, on the battlements, Horatio fears that the Ghost might tempt Hamlet toward the flood or the dreadful summit of the cliff, depriving Hamlet of his sovereignty of reason and thereby drawing him into madness and toys of desperation that would then lead to a suicidal leap (4).
Para72Polonius too is worried that the violent property of Hamlet’s madness will fordo itself and lead the will to desperate undertakings (1).
Para73One consideration that may be at work on the question of suicide in Hamlet is that coroners and juries in Renaissance England were not infrequently under pressure to find a death to be a suicide, since in such cases the property of the dead person would revert to the crown.
Para74Horatio expresses his bitter sorrow over the imminent death of Hamlet by seizing the poisoned cup and exclaiming, I am more an antique Roman than a Dane. / Here’s yet some liquor left (2). Hamlet prevents him, insisting that Horatio live after him To tell my story (2). The views of Roman Stoics on suicide as, under extreme circumstances, a noble choice is also expressed in the suicides of Brutus in Julius Caesar and of Eros and Antony in Antony and Cleopatra. This view is presented in Shakespeare as distinctly pagan and classical, and thus at variance with Christian teaching, although the suicides of Romeo and Juliet are presented sympathically.

Tertullian

160–225 CE, theologian.

Wittenberg

Para75A university in southern Germany, famous as the site where, on October 31, 1517, Martin Luther posted his 95 theses on the door of the Schlosskirche. The date is often taken as the beginning of the Reformation in western Europe. In these theses, Luther excoriated corrupt practices of The Roman Catholic Church, including nepotism, simony (the making of profit out of sacred offices), usury, pluralism (the simultaneous holding of multiple ecclesiastical offices), and most of all the practice of demanding payment in return for the granting of indulgences for the forgiveness of sins. The papacy was currently granting these indulgences on a large scale as a means of raising funds for renovation of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. Luther was excommunicated by Pope Leo X in 1521.
Para76Hamlet, as the play begins, has returned from Wittenberg for his father’s funeral and mother’s marriage; he longs to go back to school there where he has studied with Horatio, but is ordered by the new King (Claudius) to remain at court (2; 2; 2; 2).
Para77The Church of England in the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was influenced by Luther not so much as by Calvin. Shakespeare makes no overt allusion in Hamlet to the Protestant Reformation, unless, as some scholars have argued, Hamlet’s reference to A certain convocation of politic worms at 3 might have reminded theater audiences of the Diet of Worms in 1521, where Luther responded to the church’s charges of heresy; but Shakespeare’s audiences might well have wondered what theological ideas Hamlet would have encountered at the University of Wittenberg. (The idea is anachronistic, to be sure; Hamlet appears to be set in some bygone era, well before the Reformation.)

Prosopography

Bryan Valdes

David Bevington

David Bevington was the Phyllis Fay Horton Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus in the Humanities at the University of Chicago. His books include From Mankind to Marlowe (1962), Tudor Drama and Politics (1968), Action Is Eloquence (1985), Shakespeare: The Seven Ages of Human Experience (2005), This Wide and Universal Theater: Shakespeare in Performance, Then and Now (2007), Shakespeare’s Ideas (2008), Shakespeare and Biography (2010), and Murder Most Foul: Hamlet Through the Ages (2011). He was the editor of Medieval Drama (1975), The Bantam Shakespeare, and The Complete Works of Shakespeare. The latter was published in a seventh edition in 2014. He was a senior editor of the Revels Student Editions, the Revels Plays, The Norton Anthology of Renaissance Drama, and The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson (2012). Professor Bevington passed away on August 2, 2019.

Donald Bailey

Eric Rasmussen

Eric Rasmussen is Regents Teaching Professor and Foundation Professor of English at the University of Nevada. He is co-editor with Sir Jonathan Bate of the RSC William Shakespeare Complete Works and general editor, with Paul Werstine, of the New Variorum Shakespeare. He has received the Falstaff Award from PlayShakespeare.com for Best Shakespearean Book of the Year in 2007, 2012, and 2013.

James D. Mardock

James Mardock is Associate Professor of English at the University of Nevada, Associate General Editor for the Internet Shakespeare Editions, and a dramaturge for the Lake Tahoe Shakespeare Festival and Reno Little Theater. In addition to editing quarto and folio Henry V for the ISE, he has published essays on Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and other Renaissance literature in The Seventeenth Century, Ben Jonson Journal, Borrowers and Lenders, and contributed to the collections Representing the Plague in Early Modern England (Routledge 2010) and Shakespeare Beyond Doubt (Cambridge 2013). His book Our Scene is London (Routledge 2008) examines Jonson’s representation of urban space as an element in his strategy of self-definition. With Kathryn McPherson, he edited Stages of Engagement (Duquesne 2013), a collection of essays on drama in post-Reformation England, and he is currently at work on a monograph on Calvinism and metatheatrical awareness in early modern English drama.

Janelle Jenstad

Janelle Jenstad is a Professor of English at the University of Victoria, Director of The Map of Early Modern London, and Director of Linked Early Modern Drama Online. With Jennifer Roberts-Smith and Mark Beatrice Kaethler, she co-edited Shakespeare’s Language in Digital Media: Old Words, New Tools (Routledge). She has edited John Stow’s A Survey of London (1598 text) for MoEML and is currently editing The Merchant of Venice (with Stephen Wittek) and Heywood’s 2 If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody for DRE. Her articles have appeared in Digital Humanities Quarterly, Elizabethan Theatre, Early Modern Literary Studies, Shakespeare Bulletin, Renaissance and Reformation, and The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies. She contributed chapters to Approaches to Teaching Othello (MLA); Teaching Early Modern Literature from the Archives (MLA); Institutional Culture in Early Modern England (Brill); Shakespeare, Language, and the Stage (Arden); Performing Maternity in Early Modern England (Ashgate); New Directions in the Geohumanities (Routledge); Early Modern Studies and the Digital Turn (Iter); Placing Names: Enriching and Integrating Gazetteers (Indiana); Making Things and Drawing Boundaries (Minnesota); Rethinking Shakespeare Source Study: Audiences, Authors, and Digital Technologies (Routledge); and Civic Performance: Pageantry and Entertainments in Early Modern London (Routledge). For more details, see janellejenstad.com.

Jasmeen Boparai

Joey Takeda

Joey Takeda is LEMDO’s Consulting Programmer and Designer, a role he assumed in 2020 after three years as the Lead Developer on LEMDO.

Kate LeBere

Project Manager, 2020–2021. Assistant Project Manager, 2019–2020. Textual Remediator and Encoder, 2019–2021. Kate LeBere completed her BA (Hons.) in History and English at the University of Victoria in 2020. During her degree she published papers in The Corvette (2018), The Albatross (2019), and PLVS VLTRA (2020) and presented at the English Undergraduate Conference (2019), Qualicum History Conference (2020), and the Digital Humanities Summer Institute’s Project Management in the Humanities Conference (2021). While her primary research focus was sixteenth and seventeenth century England, she completed her honours thesis on Soviet ballet during the Russian Cultural Revolution. She is currently a student at the University of British Columbia’s iSchool, working on her masters in library and information science.

Martin Holmes

Martin Holmes has worked as a developer in the UVic’s Humanities Computing and Media Centre for over two decades, and has been involved with dozens of Digital Humanities projects. He has served on the TEI Technical Council and as Managing Editor of the Journal of the TEI. He took over from Joey Takeda as lead developer on LEMDO in 2020. He is a collaborator on the SSHRC Partnership Grant led by Janelle Jenstad.

Michael Best

Michael Best is Professor Emeritus at the University of Victoria, BC. He is the Founding Editor of the Internet Shakespeare Editions, of which he was the Coordinating Editor until 2017. In print, he has published editions of works of Elizabethan magic and huswifery, a collection of letters from the Australian goldfields, and Shakespeare on the Art of Love (2008). He contributed regular columns for the Shakespeare Newsletter on Electronic Shakespeares, and has written many articles and chapters for both print and online books and journals, principally on questions raised by the new medium in the editing and publication of texts. He has delivered papers and plenary lectures on electronic media and the Internet Shakespeare Editions at conferences in Canada, the USA, the UK, Spain, Australia, and Japan.

Navarra Houldin

Training and Documentation Lead 2025–present. LEMDO project manager 2022–2025. Textual remediator 2021–present. Navarra Houldin (they/them) completed their BA with a major in history and minor in Spanish at the University of Victoria in 2022. Their primary research was on gender and sexuality in early modern Europe and Latin America. They are continuing their education through an MA program in Gender and Social Justice Studies at the University of Alberta where they will specialize in Digital Humanities.

Rae S. Rostron

Rae is studying a BA in English Literature at Durham University. She is particularly interested in representations of grief and trauma in literature and is currently researching femicide in the novel. Rae has interned for Creative Media Agency (NYC) and is an acting student researcher for King College London’s Psychology Department exploring loneliness in students.

Tracey El Hajj

Junior Programmer 2019–2020. Research Associate 2020–2021. Tracey received her PhD from the Department of English at the University of Victoria in the field of Science and Technology Studies. Her research focuses on the algorhythmics of networked communications. She was a 2019–2020 President’s Fellow in Research-Enriched Teaching at UVic, where she taught an advanced course on Artificial Intelligence and Everyday Life. Tracey was also a member of the Map of Early Modern London team, between 2018 and 2021. Between 2020 and 2021, she was a fellow in residence at the Praxis Studio for Comparative Media Studies, where she investigated the relationships between artificial intelligence, creativity, health, and justice. As of July 2021, Tracey has moved into the alt-ac world for a term position, while also teaching in the English Department at the University of Victoria.

William Shakespeare

Bibliography

Connor, Francis X., ed. As You Like It. By William Shakespeare. The New Oxford Shakespeare. Ed. Gary Taylor, John Jowett, Terri Bourus, and Gabriel Egan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. 1689–1755. WSB aaag2304.
Pruitt, Anna, ed. The Tragedy of King Richard the Second. By William Shakespeare. The New Oxford Shakespeare. Ed. Gary Taylor, John Jowett, Terri Bourus, and Gabriel Egan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. 847–922. WSB aaag2304.

Orgography

Internet Shakespeare Editions (ISE1)

The Internet Shakespeare Editions (ISE) was a major digital humanities project created by Emeritus Professor Michael Best at the University of Victoria. The ISE server was retired in 2018 but a final staticized HTML version of the Internet Shakespeare Editions project is still hosted at UVic.

LEMDO Team (LEMD1)

The LEMDO Team is based at the University of Victoria and normally comprises the project director, the lead developer, project manager, junior developers(s), remediators, encoders, and remediating editors.

University of Victoria (UVIC1)

https://www.uvic.ca/

Metadata

Authority title Religion and Philosophy
Type of text Critical
Publisher University of Victoria on the Linked Early Modern Drama Online Platform
Series New Internet Shakespeare Editions
Source
File was created by Navarra Houldin. Content was pulled from the larger emdHam_Encyclopedia file, which has now been divided into four seperate files (including this one). Content was originally written for the Internet Shakespeare Editions platform by David Bevington with the help of Jasmeen Boparai. It was transformed from IML, the SGML markup language of the Internet Shakespeare Editions platform, by the LEMDO Team.
Editorial declaration n/a
Edition Released with the New Internet Shakespeare Editions 1.0
Sponsor(s)

Internet Shakespeare Editions

The Internet Shakespeare Editions (ISE) was a major digital humanities project created by Emeritus Professor Michael Best at the University of Victoria. The ISE server was retired in 2018 but a final staticized HTML version of the Internet Shakespeare Editions project is still hosted at UVic.

New Internet Shakespeare Editions

The Coordinating Editors of the NISE are Brett Greatley-Hirsch, Janelle Jenstad, James Mardock, and Sarah Neville.
Encoding description Encoded in TEI P5 according to the LEMDO Customization and Encoding Guidelines
Document status IML-TEI_INP
Funder(s) Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada
License/availability