THE ROLE OF RELIGION IN HAMLET 1

The Role Of Religion In Hamlet

Shakespeare's tragedy
M.A: Mohammed Mahmood Abbas
Department of English / Karabük University
By Supervisor
Prof. Dr. Serdar Öztürk
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Abstract

Hamlet's tragedy is one of the most important work of Shakespeare’s plays which
performed and published at the literary world. In this essay we investigate the main role
of religion in Hamlet, then attempt to know a new comprehension or interpretation in
order to understand how religious beliefs influence the characters’ motives in the play.

The trauma received by Hamlet makes him find himself a savior not just as a believer.
And, of reality he's not reluctant. Hamlet is a savior and a Christian, but, through his
religion he tries to control his mind and actions, contrasting his thoughts of punishment
with his religious beliefs.

Key words: Hamlet, Shakespeare, religion, revenge, faith, behavior.

Hamlet is more religious than others in his community; so, he looks reluctant
all the time to take a position on his father's killer because of his fearing to be a sinner.
Hamlet's behavior is based on religious. His father’s ghost, that describes himself as a
sinful person during his last days, reveals the depth of his faith, and includes advices
about the mistakes that he committed.

This play refers to religion and beliefs in general, where it is very important in
understanding the motives of the characters, for example, Hamlet pray when he comes
out of his society and makes a dialogue between him and the ghost:

HORATIO: "Heaven secure him!"

HAMLET: "So be it!" (Hamlet, I. 5. 116-117)
In general, Hamlet is a part of his society, and his speech and his behaviors
reflect his faith. He doesn't commit suicide, because he needs to comply with his God's
orders. A lot of Hamlet's words appear him to be strongly against immorality. Hamlet
denies the prevalence of debauchery and inebriation in his city.

Or that the Everlasting had not fix’d!

His canon ‘gainst self-slaughter! O God!
God, How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable,
Seem to me all the uses of this world!
Hamlet, I.2,131-135
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Claudius is described as rakish and immoral, not because he murders Hamlet's

father but because he married his mother (brother's widow). This marriage was
considered illegal at that time, Hamlet's feelings about this illegal marriage control his
mind and direct his behavior. Also, religion helps the believers to be balanced when
they receive a shock; usually disasters cause the believers to become more strong and
ascetic:

This heavy-headed revel east and west makes us

traduced and tax’d of other nations:
They clepe us drunkards, and with swinish Phrase
Soil our addition; and indeed it takes.
From our achievements, though perform’d at height,
Hamlet, I.4, 17-21
The shock which Hamlet was received makes him to consider himself not just
as a believer, but as a savior. So, he is not naturally hesitant. However, Hamlet is a
savior and believer, through his faith he tries to control his mind and behaviors,
balancing his feelings of anger with his religious beliefs. we should explain also why
the play's writer repeats the ‘crowing of the cock’ without clear significance?
characteristics of the protagonist’s personality, including his undoubtedly, the nature of
the ghost during this "Middle Ages" period was considered an important Christian
symbol, as the cock was crowing at the birth and death of Christ.

The ‘cock crowing’ shows to be a significant symbol in the play of Hamlet,

because Marcellus, the officer, tells Hamlet that his father's ghost “faded on the crowing
of the cock” (Hamlet, I.I. 158). As Hamlet holds the belief that the ‘cock crowing’
disperses demons, he wonders if this ghost is just a demon. Hamlet is not naturally
indecisive .

Angels and ministers of grace defend us!

Be thou a spirit of health or goblin damn’d,
Bring with thee airs from heaven or blasts from hell,
Be thy intents wicked or charitable,
Thou comest in such a questionable shape Hamlet, I.4, 39-43
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Did Shakespeare try to send a religious message through this play?

Shakespeare does not criticize religion, and his view of right and wrong depends
on religion, or, at least, is not incompatible with it. Shakespeare praises chastity, in
addition, the tragic end for all the sinful characters strongly suggests that Shakespeare
has a moral opinion, and wants to express his disapproval of evil and immorality.
Religion also helps the believer to remain balanced when he receives a shock; usually
disasters cause the believers to be more moral and ascetic. Religion plays an clearly
role in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. He says :

The spirit that I have seen may be the devil:

and the devil hath power To assume a pleasing shape;
yea, and perhaps Out of my weakness and my melancholy,
As he is very potent with such spirits, Abuses me to damn me
Hamlet, II.2, 596-601
Religion is often mentioned in the scenes of the play and often these religious
issues are the subject of a long debate. Hamlet seems to be considering suicide in his
famous "Be or Not to Be" statement, but later he retreats from committing suicide.
However, did Hamlet really think about suicide? How will religion be a deterrent to
this idea?, Hamlet cannot be certain what will happen to his soul after his committing
suicide. Fear of the aftermath of death, as much as any desire to continue living, so
religion is a main factor in the play.

The lines express Hamlet’s desire to die and frustration at the fact that suicide
is forbidden by Christianity. It can be seen that the language Hamlet uses refers to
anxiety and fear about the uncertain future if he chooses to commit suicide, but he never
refers to God's punishment or his anger. Instead, he speaks of death as an eternal but
dangerous sleep. That is why we note the existence of unknown and dangerous dreams
in Hamlet's novel .

Hamlet's vision of the creature man who, though 'infinite in faculties', is yet but
a 'quintessence of dust', is less convincing: for the one conception is related to a clearly-
defined heaven and hell, and the other is not. A ready identification is possible,
therefore, between the Elizabethan play and its predecessors, with the reservation that
- as O. J. Campbell puts it - 'The bare outlines of the dramatic type have been overlaid
THE ROLE OF RELIGION IN HAMLET 5

and often obscured by the fullness of the plot and the intricacies of the relationship
between the characters.' Thus Campbell is able to assert that King Lear follows the
Morality pattern in structure and the medieval homiletic tradition in content: he sees
Lear as an Everyman, rewarded by the discovery of the spiritual values he seeks just
before Death's awful summons comes to him at the close of what is essentially 'a
sublime morality play.'

The time is out of joint: O cursed spite,

That ever I was born to set it right!

Nay, come, let’s go together

Hamlet, I.5, I I. I, 188-190

The fear of the sin, unconfessed and unrepented at the point of death' at the
prayer scene in Hamlet, and in the purgatorial condition of its Ghost; and his argument
that, following our ignoring of the 'frame of orthodoxy' which encloses and illuminates
the diseased social order of Hamlet, 'the homogeneity of Hamlet's attitudes, the
consistency of moral reprehension, also tends to elude our recognition', is both cogent
and timely! There is no doubting in these examples the force and acuteness attainable
by criticism so inspired. Yet many critics would not share Merchant's confidence that,
by the reference to 'the promised end', the tragic end of King Lear 'is given its final
import by its setting within a traditional eschatology' since, whatever import the words
may have, they bring no clear finality to that terrible conclusion. It may on the contrary
be held of this play that, far from asserting orthodoxy, 'No work of art has ever
articulated more closely man's interrogation of the Gods'. It has been suggested that the
frequent references to Heaven and Hell, angels and devils make a theological
interpretation necessary. On the contrary, their very frequency deprives them of any
imaginative potency.

"Indeed, the abundant references to a supernatural order in the plays must then
invalidate a secular criticism: concepts like heaven and hell, or the working of angels
and devils, must inevitably transcend and disqualify the more limited and mundane
principles by which the characters live. It could further be demonstrated that
Shakespeare's characters act in accordance with religious concepts: that Hamlet's
distrust of the Ghost, and Macbeth's of the dagger, are based on the sound belief that
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the devil is so crafty a spirit, that he can ape and deceive our senses. He can cause one
to think he sees something, which he sees not, that he hears thunder or a trumpet, which
he hears not". Hamlet's appeal to 'angels and ministers of grace' at the Ghost's sudden
appearance is an appropriate confidence that when the devil intends to hurt us, then the
loving holy angels resist and drive him away.

It affects the actions of the characters or the plans that they have. Another
example of religion having an effect on the characters was Hamlet hesitating on killing
the praying Claudius. In the past, they believed that your sins would be forgiven by the
God as long as you have repented. (Hamlet, I.3, 47). Shakespeare explains the other
side of the church when the priest refuses to treat Ophelia in the same way he deals with
others who die naturally, seeing that she lost her right to be buried in the earth after
taking her own life:

As we have warranties: 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 allow’d her virgin crants, Her maiden

strewments and the bringing home (Hamlet, V .1, 223-229)

If he had killed Claudius that very moment, he would have immediately sent
him to heaven, which would have made the revenge pointless. Another instance is seen
when the gravediggers talk about Ophelia and giving her a Christian burial. If one were
to commit suicide, he/she should not be given a Christian burial as it violates God's
sovereignty over life, and is seen as a mortal sin. Though Ophelia drowned herself, she
was still given.

Shakespeare also criticizes some of the church's work and the clergy, Ophelia,
for example, warns her brother against doing some of the actions of corrupt clergy. it
must have been Shakespeare's intention 'to develop poetically a theological theme'; but
Bethell, who is not unsympathetic to the idea of a theological concern in Shakespeare,
THE ROLE OF RELIGION IN HAMLET 7

finds this theme subordinate to that preoccupation with deceitful appearances which is
the play's true theme. 'The play', he declares, 'is a solemn game of hunt the devil.

However, Shakespeare uses "Grecian religious figures", for example, Hyperion

(Hamlet, I.2, 140), Niobe (Hamlet, I.2, 149), and the God of sun (Hamlet, II.2, 181-
182). These symbols have rhetorical functions; they do not however, function in the
structure of this play. Hamlet's resolve to 'speak daggers' to Gertrude but use none (III.
ii. 402) is in striking accord with Luther's advice to the righteously consensus. It should
so inflict the wound that you can both mitigate and heal it; you should be so severe as
not to forget to be kind. In all such instances it must never be forgotten that the
incomparable expression of that 'Which oft was thought' is a standard of literary
excellence which applies no less to Shakespeare than it does to the eighteenth century:

Sure he that made us with such large discourse,

looking before and after, gave us not

That capability and god-like reason to

Fust in us unused

Hamlet: IV. iv. 36-9

The fact that Hamlet's has an exact parallel in Luther's Lectures on Genesis is
no cause, as R. M. Frye observes, for our jumping to the conclusion 'that Hamlet's
soliloquy on Fortinbras's army is a Christian statement'. Even the precision with which
Claudius treats the subject of forgiveness, and echoes the well-known teaching that
there can be no relenting of God's wrath till recompense and restitution to man
accompany the penitential confession we have made to Almighty God, has as its
primary object the characterizing of Claudius.

As Frye argues in another context, we have no right to assume that because

Shakespeare anywhere demonstrates an apt and accurate knowledge of an elementary
point in theology, he is therefore talking in theological terms. That Shakespeare
breathed the intellectual air of his times, and used the common coin of any of its realms
of thought in dealing with human experience, is a matter of inevitability, as it is of fact
but it does not mean that a play is to be regarded as either a thesis or a descant upon a
doctrine it may echo. So to regard it is the temptation of those who, through general or
THE ROLE OF RELIGION IN HAMLET 8

specific analogy, endeavor to show that a single religious concept a play may contain
is in fact its ruling concept, and thus to overcome the difficulty all must face who seek
to bring mere likeness into the province of interpretation. The beginning of such an
endeavor is to be found in G. Boas's sense of Desdemona's absolute moral superiority
over those who wrong her: for as long as Othello lives on, he does so not as victor, but
rather as the victim of her 'innocent meekness'. In this impression Boas can distinguish
the play's theme:

Innocence in the end conquers suspicion not by expostulation or complaint, but

by merely remaining itself and bearing no malice. Surely it is in such a sense as this
that Christ meant that the meek shall inherit the earth?

The Absence of Religion in Shakespeare', G. Santayana makes an observation

that must serve as direful epigraph to all attempts at applying theological conceptions
to the study of Shakespearian tragedy. It may indeed be Shakespeare's unspoken
comment upon the value of such undertakings. The metaphysical Hamlet, he says,
himself sees a 'true ghost', but so far reverts to 'the positivism that underlies
Shakespeare's thinking' as to speak soon after of that no inconsistency could be more
glaring or more symptomatic of a secular concern; and it encourages Santayana in his
impression that there are scarcely half a dozen passages in Shakespeare that have so
much as a religious sound, and that even these upon examination 'should not prove to
be the expression of any deep religious conception'." Santayana must surely have had
in mind direct reference to explicit formulations; in his conclusion that there is to be
found in the plays 'no fixed conception of any forces, natural or moral, transcending
our mortal energies' it is the word 'fixed' that is operative, since Shakespeare is scarcely
less full of intimations than human life itself. Nonetheless, Santayana's assertion is not
to be dismissed lightly. And his claim that Shakespeare wrote 'without a philosophy
and without a religion's is difficult to disprove by means of clear pronouncements from
the plays. The difficulty is enhanced by the attempt to overcome it. In his search for
passages susceptible of ultimate interpretation.

The difficulty is enhanced by the attempt to overcome it. In his search for
passages susceptible of ultimate interpretation, G. Boas seizes upon Prospero's
prophetic lines concerning the destined end of 'The cloud-capped towers' and 'gorgeous
palaces'. The soothing beauty of these lines, he says, has become so familiar that it
THE ROLE OF RELIGION IN HAMLET 9

requires an effort to grasp their significance. The end of this world is to be no dramatic
event, there is to be no second coming, no trumpet summoning to a Last Judgement, no
dies ire nor millennium. Instead, all our miracles of science and industry and art, the
frieze of the Parthenon, the treasures of the Vatican, the Mauretania, the Ritz Hotel,
together with the Alps and the Atlantic, are to melt into the air like vapor, and all the
human emotions that played around them are to be dissolved into nothingness like
dreams. It is a peaceful and not unbeautiful end "

It is also, unhappily, better proof that Shakespeare wrote 'without a philosophy

and without a religion' than it is of any ultimate belief. But in a further sense no apparent
reference to ultimate issues is to be trusted. The very absorption in the human that
constitutes Shakespeare's greatness as a dramatist precludes direct reference to
conceptual systems; and this negative capability precludes also the identifying of a
character's utterance with Shakespeare's own position. Though Prospero's 'cloud-
capped towers', and 'this earthly world' scorned in its imperfection by Lady Macduff
before her assassination, ~ may belong to visions of something 'transcending our mortal
energies', it would be truer to say that it is the impressions of Prospero and Lady
Macduff, and not of Shakespeare, that are in question. In his study of Shakespeare's
tragedies in relation to Christian doctrine, R. M. Frye is impeded to the conclusion that
'Shakespeare does not speak for himself in the plays, but for the characters he has
created and, according to W. Clemen, there is to be perceived in contemporary criticism
a greater willingness to accept 'the impenetrability of Shakespeare's own
"Weltanschauung'" and the 'ultimate mystery' of his personal beliefs.? If, therefore,
there are religious significances in the tragedies, they are inexplicit and indirect enough
to require an approach through inference. To this extent, Santayana's charge of
positivism is justified .

A general inference may obviously be drawn from the religious origins of

drama. Thus W. M. Merchant argues that the expansions of the story in the Mystery
plays are always 'strictly congruous with the intention of the biblical narrative', and that
the lively obtrusion of secular interest in the two Shepherd plays produces nothing alien
or heterodox, but dramatic episodes that are 'complementary in their serious exploration
of man's fallen nature ... taken up into the joy of redemption.'
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The point is well made, for there is nothing in the secular story of Mac the
Shepherd's supposed child which does not give new interest and meaning to the
announcement of the Christ-child's birth. Such consistency as this, and the clear line of
derivation from the worship and the preaching of the Church that constrains Elizabethan
tragedy to make the human soul the true center of its action, enable Merchant to declare
with confidence that Marlowe's Faustus is 'in series with the late medieval Morality',
and to demonstrate the fraudulent nature of Faustus's intellectualism, and the
blasphemous reversal of values by which Marlowe indicates his hero's condemned
state. But the assumed similarity between a Faustus lured into damnation by his gifts of
intellect, and Hamlet's vision of the creature man who, though 'infinite in faculties', is
yet but a 'quintessence of dust', is less convincing: for the one conception is related to
a clearly-defined heaven and hell, and the other is not .

A ready identification is possible, therefore, between the Elizabethan play and

its predecessors, with the reservation that - as O. J. Campbell puts it - 'The bare outlines
of the dramatic type have been overlaid and often obscured by the fullness of the plot
and the intricacies of the relationship between the characters.' Thus Campbell is able to
assert that King Lear follows the Morality pattern in structure and the medieval
homiletic tradition in content: he sees Lear as an Everyman, rewarded by the discovery
of the spiritual values he seeks just before Death's awful summons comes to him at the
close of what is essentially 'a sublime morality play."
THE ROLE OF RELIGION IN HAMLET 11

Conclusion

Hamlet's play shows us how religion and faith play an important role in
changing human life from evil to good, that a person who carries good inside is far from
committing sins and mistakes that in turn hurt others or end their fate. Hamlet was a
good example. The writer wants to show how religion changes Hamlet's ideas to
goodness even though his father was killed by his uncle. Therefore, it can be said that
if a person wants to live a good life away from harming others, he must be a strong
believer in order to know how to balance his feelings and control his actions with others.

Shakespeare in his novel Hamlet was not against religion, but criticized the
wrong methods of some clerics in that period, and he wants to clarify the idea that "right
and wrong depends on religion and faith." Shakespeare's novel is one of the most
important novels that dealt mainly with religion, and how faith can turn others into
strong and faithful people. Religion also helps the believers to remain balanced when
they receive a shock; usually disasters cause the believers to be more moral and ascetic.
So, this is what we observe in Hamlet's character.
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