SOURCE: Rosenblatt, Jason P. “Aspects of the Incest Problem in Hamlet.” Shakespeare Quarterly 29, no. 3 (summer 1978): 349-64.

[In the following essay, Rosenblatt presents a theological interpretation of Hamlet's accusations of incest against his mother and uncle in Hamlet, and also stresses the symbolic connotations of incest as a metaphor for political and religious corruption in the drama.]

The more or less current status of some non-theological interpretations of the incest prohibition in Hamlet attests to the ingenuity with which guilt can be assigned. Sophisticated ethical systems are always interesting, and critical emphasis has shifted accordingly from Claudius' sinfulness in marrying his murdered brother's widow to Hamlet's more obscurely sullied nature. Ernest Jones, taking a Freudian, Oedipal approach, stresses Hamlet's incestuous desire to supplant his father in his mother's affection: Hamlet's hatred of Claudius thereby becomes “the jealous detestation of one evil-doer towards his successful fellow.”¹ Roy W. Battenhouse stipulates a definition of incest as narcissism (“a love which circles about the self”)² and then applies it to Hamlet. Dover Wilson refers to Scripture in adducing evidence of Hamlet's “sullied flesh,” but even he misapplies the relevant verse. The Prince “is, wishing that his ‘sullied flesh’ might melt as snow does. For his blood is tainted, his very flesh corrupted, by what his mother has done, since he is bone of her bone and flesh of her flesh.”³

The verse Wilson quotes actually refers, of course, to the relation of wife to husband rather than to that of son to mother: “Then the man said, This now is bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh. She shalbe called woman, because she was taken out of man. Therefore shal man leave his father and his mother, and shal cleave to his wife, and they shalbe one flesh” (Genesis ii. 23-24; see also Matthew xix. 4-6 and Mark x. 6-8).⁴ Hamlet is so familiar with these verses that he can sport with them at the King's expense. He correctly applies them to the conjugal relation when he bids farewell to Claudius as his “dear mother”:

KING
Thy loving father, Hamlet.
HAMLET
My mother—father and mother is man and wife,
man and wife is one flesh, and so, my mother.

(IV. iii. 49-51)⁵

Alluding to the indissoluble bond between Gertrude and the murdered King Hamlet, Hamlet's reply is calculated to discomfit a man who has ignored the impediment of affinity in the first degree collateral by taking his brother's wife. In the fourth century, St. Basil, relying on these verses, had condemned marriage between a brother-in-law and a sister-in-law.⁶ Twelve centuries later, Nicholas Harpsfield handled the argument that “he that marrieth his brother's wife taketh his brother's flesh and blood to marriage, the which thing plainly is against the law of nature; for seeing the husband and wife be one flesh and blood, truly he that taketh his brother's wife taketh also the flesh and blood of his brother.”⁷

Aside from carrying the logic of incest to its conclusion by fusing Claudius, Gertrude, and his dead father, Hamlet reminds the King of the very basis of affinity. As Calvin notes in the Institutes, “man and woman are made one flesh only by carnal copulation.”⁸ By the eighth century carnal intercourse (unitas carnis) had replaced the marital contract (justae nuptiae) in establishing identity of relationship between oneself and the relatives of one's spouse, thus putting affinity on a plane with consanguinity.⁹

Hamlet's reply to his “uncle-father” suggests that a traditional conception of incest need not lack ingenuity, particularly if it draws on the special resources available to an obsessed mind. At the end of the play, when the Prince, in a final, terrible pun on “union,” dispatches the “incestuous, murd'rous, damnèd Dane” to seek his union with Gertrude in the hereafter (V. ii. 315-17), he gives full expression to an outrage first registered in the low tones of the opening aside. “A little more than kin, and less than kind!” (I. ii. 65)—Hamlet's first words, in their binary aspect, ingeniously parody the antitheses of Claudius' first speech; they also declare an absolute spiritual opposition to the King, whose trespass has obscured familial identities once clear and firmly fixed.

I

Hamlet's argument against Claudius rests on a text in Leviticus: “Thou shal not discover the shame of thy brothers wife: for it is thy brothers shame” (Lev. xviii. 16; see also xx. 21). The act of uncovering that convicts Claudius of incest engrosses Hamlet's attention: the flash of “incestuous sheets” (I. ii. 157) and the image of the King “in th' incestuous pleasure of his bed” (III. iii. 90) expand in the closet-scene to the duration of an act, performed “In the rank sweat of an enseamèd bed” (III. iv. 93).

Though Claudius may be “as shrewd and relentless at catechizing himself as he is at manipulating others,”¹⁰ he never adverts to the sin of incest. Even during the prayer scene (III. iii), when he frankly acknowledges responsibility for the sins attendant upon a brother's murder, he remains silent on the question of incest. His silence may derive, not from shame that prevents him from facing a peculiarly offensive act, but rather from a conviction that in this instance, at least, his behavior was unexceptionable. For Hamlet, no less than Richard II, “sets the word itself against the word.”

The Scriptural passage opposed to Hamlet's central text and associated with Claudius is from Deuteronomy:

When brethren dwell together, and one of them dieth without children, the wife of the deceased shall not marry to another; but his brother shall take her, and raise up seed for his brother. And the first son he shall have of her he shall call by his name: that his name be not abolished out of Israel.

(Deut. xxv. 5-6)¹¹

A galaxy of authorities were available to sanction a man's marriage to a deceased brother's relict. St. Augustine refers to this tradition as a way of resolving an apparent contradiction in Scripture, by which St. Joseph is identified first as the son of Jacob (Matthew i. 16), then as the son of Heli (Luke iii. 23). Earlier, Augustine had implied that Heli was the adoptive father: “The Law, however, also adopted the children of the deceased by ordering that a brother marry the wife of his childless, deceased brother and raise up seed for his deceased brother.”¹² Renaissance expositors likewise insisted that a brother “in so doing, did no wrong, sed officium praestabat defuncto fratri, but did performe a good office to his deceased brother.” They observed that “the law doth not only permit a widow to marie againe: but if her husband died before he had any children, it commanded the next kinsman that was living and free to marie her, that he might raise up seed to his brother deceased.” They were careful to note, however, that “when God commanded to doe this, he willed them not to doe this to satisfie lust … but onely that the elder brother might be a tipe of Jesus Christ, who should never wante a seede in the Church.”¹³ On the authority of Deuteronomy, then, Renaissance theologians insisted that “the brother not only might, but then was bound to marie his brothers wife.”¹⁴

Hamlet's very existence, of course, keeps the relationship of Claudius and Gertrude within the scope of the Levitical prohibition. Only a childless widow might remarry; thus, the marriage of Gertrude and Claudius, in addition to denying the dead King any claims upon his widow, insults the living prince by ignoring his birth, which should have blocked the union. I will return to this point, which is of some importance in explaining Hamlet's depression. Meanwhile, we should note Shakespeare's mastery in portraying Claudius, from the very start, as a caricature of the virtuous brother of Deuteronomy.

The true levirate marriage is a secondary union, an extension of an existing marriage. By virtue of the moral bonds between brothers, it exists to preserve the individual identity of one brother beyond his normal lifespan by the sacrifice of at least part of the individuality of the other.¹⁵ This kind of self-sacrifice is rejected by Onan, who is slain by God for his refusal to raise up seed to his dead brother Er (Genesis xxxviii). In Deuteronomy (xxv. 7-10), less severe punishments were provided for refusals such as Onan's, perhaps in recognition of a brother's natural reluctance to give up the right to found a family of his own.

Claudius' marriage to Gertrude, far from the true levirate relationship described in Deuteronomy, is an example of widow-inheritance, a very different, and more primitive, kinship institution, in which the identity of the deceased is supplanted by that of the successor. King Hamlet's life, crown, and queen are taken by Claudius, who has violated every token of his brother's identity. Yet these two spiritually opposed kinship institutions are superficially similar. The features they share include the principle of equivalence of siblings (because one brother replaces another)¹⁶ and the non-equivalence of genitor and pater. Where a legal fiction in Deuteronomy counts the son of the levir as the descendant of the dead elder brother, this fiction operates in reverse in the case of widow-inheritance and makes the surviving brother the “owner” of the children begotten by the brother now deceased.¹⁷

If Claudius can “smile and smile,” it is partly because blurred distinctions between two superficially similar institutions afford him, if not a true refuge, at least a role to play. A Tudor audience's knowledge of the true levirate would have been sharpened by the controversy surrounding the marriage and subsequent divorce of Henry VIII and Catherine, the childless widow of Henry's brother Prince Arthur. All of us know that Claudius is a sham, but this more specialized knowledge might help us to see more clearly what type of sham he is. We know that Claudius' marriage to Gertrude is

                                                                      such a deed
As from the body of contraction plucks
The very soul, and sweet religion makes
A rhapsody of words.

(III. iv. 46-49)

I would like to suggest, more specifically, that the King's role is a travesty of the levir's. The validity of his marriage to Gertrude actually depends on the absolute severance of the earlier marital union by death and obliteration of all his brother's claims. Yet Claudius opens the play's second scene by pretending that he keeps those claims alive. Far from remaining silent on the matter of his brother's death and his own recent nuptials (for even the true levirate links a funeral with a wedding), he refers to “our dear brother's death” (I. ii. l), “our late dear brother's death” (I. ii. 19), and “our most valiant brother” (I. ii. 25). Gertrude's equivocal status, similar to that of the sister-in-law / wife of Deuteronomy, is forthrightly acknowledged: “our sometime sister, now our queen” (I. ii. 8). Even the figure of freshness Claudius suggests in his opening words (“Though yet … the memory be green” [I. ii. 1-2]) is Biblical; see Jeremiah xvii. 7-8 and Hosea xiv. 8.

In taking the Queen as his wife, Claudius also takes Denmark, the estate Gertrude holds in jointure (I. ii. 9). He prefers to dwell on his role as protector of the land won from King Fortinbras by “our most valiant brother” (I. ii. 17-25). Reminding us that one of the most important conditions attached to the levirate bond is that “the inheritance must be preserved, and kept” for the dead brother's son,¹⁸ Claudius says:

                    We pray you throw to earth
This unprevailing woe, and think of us
As of a father, for let the world take note
You are the most immediate to our throne,
And with no less nobility of love
Than that which dearest father bears his son
Do I impart toward you.

(I. ii. 106-12)

This solemn proclamation of Hamlet as heir must have seemed to the court at Elsinore a “confirmation of the inheritance” of the dead brother's estate.¹⁹ It is clear, for example, that Rosencrantz can scarcely credit Hamlet's complaint that he lacks advancement: “How can that be, when you have the voice of the king himself for your succession in Denmark?” (III. ii. 327-28). Yet the condition of the levirate bond that the inheritance be preserved is designed to prevent family property from being broken up and passing into strange hands. Its purpose is to protect a son who is at the time of the marriage unborn. Hamlet, however, already exists and he is of age. Claudius is thus in reality “preserving” an inheritance that he has stolen.

Since the only clear exception to the Levitical prohibition is the case of marriage with a widow whose husband has died without offspring, the presence of Hamlet in the second scene is utterly destructive of Claudius' status as levir. Yet Claudius sounds unperturbed. In his treatment of Hamlet in this scene, he seems to be exploiting the principle of the non-equivalence of genitor and pater that is common to both the true levirate and widow-inheritance. As Nicholas Harpsfield notes, a principal reason for the levirate marriage “was that the brother deceased might continue his name and family by his brother's child (which should be counted not his brother's but his own), and that he might avoid the shame and infamy wherewith they were noted … in the old law which had no children.”²⁰ In Deuteronomy's statement that “he shall call [the child] by his name” (Deut. xxv. 6), “his” refers to the dead brother. The child is to “be counted and called the seed of the dead man, not of the living.”²¹

Claudius' determination to play paterfamilias with Hamlet goes beyond the common custom whereby an adoptive father refers to a stepson as a son. The King's inheritance of the empire and the Queen involves collateral ownership of the son. Claudius thus attempts to exploit the legal fiction of widow-inheritance which makes Hamlet his son. His rhetoric, however, is furnished by the conventions of the true levirate. His first words to the Prince remind us of Deuteronomy xxv. 6: “But now, my cousin Hamlet, and my son—” (I. ii. 64). For Hamlet this is one more example of Claudius' obscene unification of a natural duality—of what Stephen Booth calls “the excessively lubricated rhetoric by which Claudius makes unnatural connections between moral contraries.”²² Claudius, who would like to see things differently, does not sound ashamed to be Hamlet's “uncle-father” (II. ii. 366). Indeed, he concludes his conversation with the Prince by placing an additional stress on the already complicated relationship: “Our chiefest courtier, cousin, and our son” (I. ii. 117).

The relationship of father to son has been defined in this scene by Polonius and Laertes. The son requests leave to return to France, and the father grants it. Now Claudius, in a 31-line lecture on fathers and sons (I. ii. 87-117), acts like a father by refusing to grant Hamlet leave to return to Wittenberg. Hamlet rejects this sham by proclaiming obedience to his mother: “I shall in all my best obey you, madam” (I. ii. 120; my italics).

Giving the dead a “name” is a subsidiary element of the levirate institution, based on Deuteronomy xxv. 6. In his explication of the verse, John Weemse considers the question of giving the name of the dead man to the child begotten by his living brother:

For Deut. 25. 6. the words in the originall are these: Primogenitus quem pepererit stabit super nomen fratris sui, shall succeed in the name of the brother: Therefore it may seeme they were called after the elder brothers name.²³

In a figural reading of this passage, influenced by Origen, Augustine, and Ambrose, among others, Henry Ainsworth identifies the dead brother as Christ and his living sons as Christians, who bear his name: “For the church of Israel was his wife … who bare him no children by the Law. … But the Apostles (his brethren, Joh. 20. 17) by the immortall seed of the Gospel, begat children unto him not that they should be called by any mans name, 1 Cor. 1.12.13 but to carry the name of Christ.”²⁴

The coincidence of an identical name for his dead brother and his dead brother's seed (“Hamlet our dear brother,” “my cousin Hamlet, and my son”) contributes to making Claudius' situation superficially similar to the levir's. Of course a moment's thought reveals the true face behind the King's temporary and imperfect disguise. His own name, in fact, suggests incest and manipulation, for the Roman Emperor Claudius married his niece Agrippina, an act considered incestuous according to Roman law, which he therefore changed.

The levirate, presupposed in patriarchal times and institutionalized in Deuteronomy,²⁵ is the only law in the Pentateuch in which the punishment consists of public degradation. The man who refuses to marry his sister-in-law has silenced his brother; hence the law speaks metaphorically of an Israelite's name being wiped out. Claudius, of course, is a fratricide who has the audacity to rely on the law of fraternal succession in order to supplant his brother. And when he succeeds in his plot against young Hamlet, he blots out his brother's name, just as he has earlier blotted out his brother's life.

The true levirate is an exception to the Levitical prohibition. The Bible “forbiddeth such commixtions for lust, but for the succession of mankind [it] commandeth.”²⁶ Like other social institutions and ritual activities, the levirate appears in this light as a denial of the power of death. The common birth of brothers is the principal base in nature for the institution. By subverting the levirate institution, Claudius allies himself with the power of death. The solitary human organism born at a particular time and place is the biological base for his position, which opposes continuity: “Thou know'st 'tis common. All that lives must die” (I. ii. 72); “you must know your father lost a father, / That father lost, lost his” (I. ii. 89-90). Little did King Hamlet know that his marriage with Gertrude more nearly resembled a primitive sort of adelphic polyandry than a Christian institution. Similarly, behind the rhetoric of the levirate lies the reality of incest, the violation of Leviticus xviii, a “decalogical” code forbidding the promiscuous unions practiced among the Canaanites.²⁷

II

Our knowledge of the conflict between verses in Leviticus and verses in Deuteronomy and their respective commentaries sets the stage for a deeper understanding of the conflict between Hamlet and Claudius in the play. The clash may be as private as a duel in a lady's chamber:

QUEEN
Hamlet, thou hast thy father much offended.
HAMLET
Mother, you have my father much offended.

(III. iv. 10-11)

But that the scale of the conflict is larger is dramatized by Claudius' strategically-placed reminder of the court's participation in his marriage decision:

                              Nor have we herein barred
Your better wisdoms, which have freely gone
With this affair along. For all, our thanks.

(I. ii. 14-16)

Later, the private domestic conflict expands beyond even national boundaries, encompassing the entire universe. Hamlet tells Gertrude:

                              Heaven's face does glow,
And this solidity and compound mass,
With heated visage, as against the doom,
Is thought-sick at the act.

(II. vi. 49-52)

Hamlet's capacity to weight personal conflict with the gravity of universal implication distinguishes it from its sources. Political and religious implications of incest are absent from Saxo's Historiae Danicae and Belleforest's Histories tragiques. In these versions of the Hamlet story, incest is a general term of abuse, always coupled with fratricide to emphasize unnatural villainy. Though the term is used dyslogistically in Hamlet (“that incestuous, that adulterate beast”; “thou incestuous, murd'rous, damnèd Dane”), it is also seen as a specific offense: marriage to a deceased brother's widow. In moments of uncontrollable rage, Hamlet emphasizes this offense directly: “married with my uncle, my father's brother” (I. ii. 151-52); “You are the queen, your husband's brother's wife” (III. iv. 16; see also line 30). In moments when his rage is kept under control, Hamlet names the offense more indirectly, noting that it imposes on his family a hyphenated set of unnatural mixed relations: “my uncle-father and aunt-mother” (II. ii. 366-67).

But if incest in Hamlet is a specific, particular offense, it is also symbolic of a more general religious and political corruption. Hamlet's opening soliloquy suggests that the incest of the King and the Queen is emblematic of goodness in thrall to evil, of the state in thrall to a usurper. The Ghost warns that the kingdom is polluted:

Let not the royal bed of Denmark be
A couch for luxury and damnèd incest.

(I. v. 82-83)

III

An allusion in Der Bestrafte Brudermord hints at some of the larger implications of incest in Hamlet. In that play's closet scene, Gertrude, her heart wrung by Hamlet, complains:

Had I not taken in marriage my brother-in-law, I should not have robbed my son of the crown of Denmark. But what can be done about things that are done? Nothing, they must stay as they are. Had not the Pope allowed such a marriage, it would never have happened.

[my italics]²⁸

Gertrude's reference to a papal dispensation from the impediment of affinity in the first degree collateral might remind us of the “great matter” of King Henry VIII, which furnished Shakespeare with the plot of his last history play. For at certain moments in Hamlet the imagined world of the play seems to shade into the real world of Shakespeare's England.²⁹

Henry VIII's decision to divorce Catherine of Aragon and marry Anne Boleyn had generated a conflict international in scope and warlike in intensity. Henry rested his case on the fact that Catherine, his wife of eighteen years, was the widow of his deceased brother, Prince Arthur, who had died in 1502 at the age of fifteen. In the eyes of the English people, the divorce struggle pitted Henry against Emperor Charles V and the Pope (for Julius had originally granted the bull of dispensation that permitted the marriage, and Clement VII now defended that decision). By implication, however, the struggle also amassed other polarities: Anne and Catherine, their respective daughters Elizabeth I and Mary I, England and Spain, Protestantism and Catholicism. Of special interest here is the extent to which these oppositions were brought into focus by the apparent conflict between Leviticus and Deuteronomy. Henry's decision was authorized primarily by the text of Leviticus, which he interpreted as a divine prohibition the Pope was not permitted to set aside. Henry's many learned enemies in England and on the Continent based their counteroffensive on the verses in Deuteronomy treating levirate marriage.

In that quarrel, a great deal depended on the translation of Ah (frater in the Vulgate), used indifferently to mean “brother” in the Hebrew and Vulgate texts of both Leviticus and Deuteronomy. Tudor history would invite Claudius' alliance with the unacceptable (but correct) Douai translation of Deuteronomy xxv. 5: “his [the deceased brother's] brother shall take her [the wife of the deceased].” Hamlet's (and Shakespeare's) Protestant Bibles, however—the Coverdale (1535), the Geneva (1560), and the Bishops' (1568)—all distorted this verse into compliance with a Henrician emphasis on the unacceptability of the levirate.³⁰ These Bibles interpreted “brother” in the strict sense in Leviticus, while they took it to mean cognatus, a relative, in Deuteronomy. For them, the crucial phrase in Deuteronomy read: “his [the deceased man's] kinsman shall go in unto her [the widow], and take her to wife, and do the kinsmans office to her.” A note on this verse in the Geneva Bible explains the substitution of “kinsman” for the literally correct “brother”:

Because the Ebrewe worde signifieth not the natural brother, & the worde, that signifieth a brother, is taken also for a kinseman: it semeth that it is not ment that the natural brother shuld mary his brothers wife, but some other of the kinred, that was in that degre which might mary.

The Geneva gloss's political bias becomes clear when it is compared with the relevant text of a partisan sixteenth-century English tract on the divorce. The form of the anonymous “Glasse of the Truthe” is that of a Socratic dialogue between a lawyer and a divine, with the divine speaking for Henry (and the author). Here they consider the word “brother”:

THE Lawyer
Why, I pray you, is there more mystery of that word in the Deuteronomye than in the Levityke?
THE Divine
Yea, forsooth; for in the Levityke it can nor may be taken for other than for the very brother, the text being judge itself. But by the Deuteronomyke, as many taketh it, is meant the next of the blood after the degrees prohibite; though he be but kinsman. …(31)

The divine adds that “the taking of this word” in Deuteronomy is “so highly entreated in many other works … that it were but a loss of time to commune any more of it.”³²

If “kin” and “brother” are politically charged terms, then Hamlet's first words, addressed to the audience, may help us to establish a context for the conflict that will follow. Claudius, playing the levir, emphasizing relation, calls Hamlet his cousin and his son—with cousin a term “frequently applied to a nephew” (OED), as in “Where is my cousin your son?” (Much Ado About Nothing, I. ii. 1-2). Hamlet's aside—“A little more than kin, and less than kind”—may be construed as alluding to the version of Deuteronomy that he (and the audience) accepts, where a kinsman may marry a man's widow but a brother may not.

A brief excursus into Henry's great matter, ending with Shakespeare's own treatment of the subject in The Life of King Henry VIII, will perhaps help us to understand some of the problems raised in Hamlet by a marriage that admits impediments.

IV

Formulations of Henry's urgent problem in terms of contrasting Scriptural verses abound in the sixteenth century.³³ Pressing for divorce, Henry put his case to universities at home and abroad (“all famous colleges, / Almost in Christendom,” Henry VIII, III. ii. 66-67). Though he managed to get favorable replies, the one hard place in their various determinations was “the dispensation by the law of Deuteronomie, of stirring up the brothers seed.”³⁴

Under political pressure, what would otherwise be only an interesting theological crux became a vexed question, and the note of urgency we find in many of the sixteenth-century tracts is one we associate with polemic rather than with exegesis. The adherents of Leviticus xviii. 16 could exploit two fears that plagued Englishmen: Catholicism and the influence of Spanish power. Boundaries between religion and politics were so fluid that it is impossible to tell whether or not Thomas Beard was deliberately punning when he attributed the marriage of Henry and Catherine to the desire “to have this Spanish affinitie continued.”³⁵ In any event, his subsequent comments on the “unfortunat marriage,” “unjustly dispensed withall by the Pope,” indicate his displeasure with both the incestuous union and the alliance with Spain.

Many partisans were able to fuse personal, religious, and political sentiments—to see the events neatly—as in the quip that “the King divorced from Lady Katharine, and from the Pope, both at the same time”;³⁶ or, as in the claim of the Roman Catholic Jean de Lorin that “the perverse interpretation of this chapter [Leviticus xviii] was Fundamentum schismatis Anglicani: the very foundation of the schisme of England.”³⁷

Some of the participants in the divorce dispute, conscious of mixed attitudes, achieve an admirable degree of control in their writings. Recognizing that each side's arguments are determined as much by political as by moral considerations, they treat dissenting opinions with a tolerance bred of sophistication. Thus Hugh Latimer notes the extent to which shifting political currents have influenced interpretations of the crucial Biblical verses: “Yea, men think that my lord himself [Dr. John Stokesly, Lord Bishop of London] hath thought in times past, that by God's law a man might marry his brother's wife, which now both dare think and say contrary; and yet this his boldness might have chanced, in pope Julius's days, to stand him either in a fire, or else in a fagot.”³⁸ Bishop Latimer himself accepts the validity of the Levitical prohibition; but he emphasizes his fellowship with those who disagree with him, and he laments the “dissension in a Christian congregation” caused by extremist views.³⁹

When Shakespeare treated the matter of Henry's divorce directly, in The Life of King Henry the Eighth, he dramatized the modulation of received opinion into compassionate generosity. By 1613, the contradictory attitudes toward the divorce given full treatment in the play would probably have been conventional. They are striking nonetheless. Shakespeare's Katherine, a foreigner and a Roman Catholic, solicits our sympathy throughout the play. Against the latinizing Wolsey, she appears as a plain-speaking Englishwoman (III. i. 42-46). Here, as in Hamlet, the conflict of Biblical verses is at least strongly implied. For Henry the question is “Whether our daughter were legitimate, / Respecting this our marriage with the dowager, / Sometimes our brother's wife” (II. iv. 177-79).

In this play, the conflict between verses in Leviticus and Deuteronomy is subordinated to still another conflict relevant to Hamlet. Like the marriage of Gertrude in Der Bestrafte Brudermord, Katherine's marriage to Henry was dispensed by the Pope from the impediment of affinity in the first degree collateral. Katherine thus refuses to be bound by the Church of England and submits her case to the Church of Rome. She tells the various English bishops and cardinals:

I do refuse you for my judge and here,
Before you all, appeal unto the pope,
To bring my whole cause 'fore his holiness
And to be judged by him.

(II. iv. 116-19)

A question vehemently debated by Protestants and Catholics was the dispensability of God's word in Leviticus. The Reformation leaders held that the Levitical prohibition was fixed for all time by divine law, that no dispensation could validate Henry's marriage to his dead brother's widow, and that in general the practice of papal dispensations was motivated by the desire for profit.⁴⁰ The Parliamentary “Act concerning the King's succession” (1533) declared that the Pope could not dispense from the impediment of marriage with a deceased brother's widow.

The Protestant Andrew Willet, in Synopsis Papismi (1594), sets down the starkly opposed doctrines of “Protestant” and “Papist.” He holds, with Calvinist opinion definitely accepted by the Church of England, that the Levitical law forbidding the marriage is “natural and perpetual”:

We may affirm that it is utterly unlawful for any Christian man to marry within the degrees prohibited: neither can any human power dispense with such marriages, but the equity of that law being grounded upon nature is in force for ever.⁴¹

Opposing Catholics, as Willet notes, held that the Levitical law was in large measure judicial and therefore dispensable. The opinions of two great Catholics, John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, and the Dominican jurist, Francisco de Vitoria, hold special interest, since they can be applied to the case of Claudius. Fisher considers the question of marriage with a dead brother's wife who has had children by him, and concludes that in such a case a papal dispensation is possible, valid, and licit. A fortiori, he says, such a dispensation is even easier in the case of a dead brother's childless widow.⁴² Vitoria holds that in the absence of human law, marriage with such a widow is lawful, whether she be childless or not.⁴³ One of the reasons given to support the dispensability of the Levitical prohibition is the absolute severance of the marital union by death.⁴⁴

Though the fate of Shakespeare's Katherine is bound up in these doctrinal matters, mechanistic duality is complicated in the play by human feeling. Katherine, in her patience, has been compared favorably with Hermione in The Winter's Tale.⁴⁵ Indeed, a virtually allegorical servant named Patience attends Katherine: “Patience, be near me still, and set me lower” (IV. ii. 76); “Softly, gentle Patience” (IV. ii. 82); “Nay, Patience, / You must not leave me yet” (IV. ii. 165-66). This bearing of such emphasis in a Protestant play might have reminded the audience of a long narrative poem on the divorce, The History of Grisild the Second, written by Queen Mary's chaplain William Forrest, which identifies Catherine with the eponymous heroine.⁴⁶

The only way that Shakespeare can balance sympathy for Katherine with unequivocal acceptance of the divorce is by emphasizing Henry's sincere concern for the next generation. Katherine's failure to produce an heir would have weighed powerfully with Shakespeare's audience:

                                                            … her male issue
Or died where they were made or shortly after
This world had aired them. Hence I took a thought
This was a judgment on me, that my kingdom
(Well worthy the best heir o' th' world) should not
Be gladded in't by me. …

(II. iv. 189-94)

Henry's distress in the play is generated by concern for this children—for those who died in the womb or shortly after birth, and for his daughter Mary, whose marriage to the Duke of Orleans was impeded by the question of her legitimacy.

In Shakespeare's Henry VIII, the child Elizabeth, symbol of England's future, purifies the union of Henry and Anne Boleyn. The play concludes with the pageantry of Elizabeth's christening and with Cranmer's prophecy, filled with Biblical images and phrases. Frank Kermode has properly noted that Katherine's tragedy “must not be allowed to detract from the pleasure the auditors are expected to feel at the end of the play, which is of course related to the happy dynastic progress of English history since that birth, a progress which might have been very different if Henry had not put away Katherine.”⁴⁷

That the birth of Elizabeth transforms an otherwise sinful union into a virtuous one is confirmed by Andrew Willet in his commentary on Leviticus xviii. Willet repeats the most vicious slanders against Henry, including his purported involvement with Anne Boleyn's mother. He relishes the ribald counsel of Francis Brian, Henry's Vicar of Hell, and rehearses the accusation that Henry “had first carnall knowledge of the mother and then of the daughter; and that he made his owne bastard daughter his wife.” Then, abruptly, he rejects all the scandals: “The renowned fame, and prosperous raygne of the issue of this Marriage, our late most noble Soveraigne, Queene Elizabeth, doth cleare this suspition, and stop Papists slaunderous mouthes.”⁴⁸

V

The figure of Elizabeth affords us a convenient opportunity to return from the court of Henry VIII to the court at Elsinore, though in returning we relinquish absolute distinctions between the world of history and the world of a play. Elizabeth's silent, powerful presence connects the history play that celebrates her birth to the more fictive drama written for an audience she rules. Critics of Hamlet have observed that an audience being asked to convict Claudius and Gertrude of incest is at the same time being asked to remember the circumstances of Elizabeth's birth and to take the Henrician side in the Scriptural controversy. On the question of incest, Bertram Joseph notes, “The subjects of Elizabeth were likely to have been very much alive to it, for she owed her throne and her legitimacy to her father's belated insistence on the sinfulness of his union with Catherine of Aragon, his dead brother's widow.”⁴⁹

One royal brother marrying another brother's widow is the single strong likeness in the cases of Henry and Claudius. The differences may be more important. Henry dissolves a marriage of almost twenty years on the suspicion of incest (“no Marriage … but rather an incestuous and detestable Adultery, as the Act of Parliament doth term it”).⁵⁰ This suspicion depends on a perhaps overly rigorous interpretation of the Levitical prohibition. Claudius, on the other hand, marries in defiance even of the most permissive interpretation of either Leviticus or Deuteronomy. More important, Henry's stated motive for dissolving the union is concern for a child yet unborn, symbol of England's line. By contrast, Claudius and Gertrude, posting with “dexterity to incestuous sheets,” have in effect denied Hamlet's very existence.

Elizabeth's birth is the ultimate vindication of Henry's decision to divorce Catherine, and it turns the questionable union with Anne Boleyn into a virtuous one. Hamlet's birth is a diriment impediment to Gertrude's remarriage, and it turns what would otherwise have been a virtuous union (at least according to Deuteronomy) into an incestuous one. The true levirate requires that the widow be childless. Hamlet's existence has thus freed Gertrude from the obligation to marry Claudius, but she has not chosen freedom. Where a Freudian, Oedipal view of incest presumes Hamlet's envy of his father, a Scriptural view of the incest prohibition might posit instead a relationship of concord between father and son, both of whom require from Gertrude the loyalty that would confirm their existence. The union of Gertrude and Claudius confirms instead the death of love, and it constitutes an insult to Hamlet, who might as well never have been born.

Gertrude might have been innocent of the sin of incest had Hamlet never been born, and it is tempting to suggest that this fact cuts both ways. Certainly before Act V, scene ii, in which Hamlet interprets his rescue, and thus his continued existence, as a sign of Divine Providence, he can be heard complaining against the limitations imposed by fate on human will. Sometimes these complaints focus upon the problem of “birth, wherein [men] are not guilty, / Since nature cannot choose his origin” (I. iv. 25-26). Many of the death-wish passages in the play express Hamlet's desire never to have been born: “O cursèd spite / That ever I was born. …” (I. v. 189); “… it were better my mother had not borne me” (III. i. 124). Laertes speaks truer than he knows when he says of Hamlet: “his will is not his own. / For he himself is subject to his birth” (I. iii. 17-18).

It is difficult to refrain from developing the point that existence is indeed problematic for Hamlet—that he feels tainted, even before the Ghost has appeared to him, because Gertrude's incestuous guilt is somehow involved with his birth. Some of the play's best critics have, after all, remarked on its ability to contain contradictory systems of value, and on the Prince's extraordinary self-consciousness, his habit of considering all sides of a problem. Nor is it surprising that the play has been subjected to such a large share of existential cant: Hamlet encounters his existence as gratuitous; he feels de trop; he stands in for superfluous twentieth-century man. Finally, in Hamlet's trenchant identification of his mother in the closet-scene, the accusation of incest and the wish never to have been born are uttered in the same breath:

You are the queen, your husband's brother's wife,
And (would it were not so) you are my mother.

(III. iv. 16-17)

Yet this idea accords too well with the anachronistic modern tendency to see Hamlet in the closet-scene as somehow, like old Norway, “impotent and bedrid.” To be sexually impotent yet confined to (and obsessed with) the bed is like being unable to assassinate the King yet confined to his court. Such a view, emphasizing Hamlet's helplessness, would obscure the truth: it is not Hamlet's birth that has made the marriage incestuous; rather, it is the action of Gertrude and Claudius in marrying.

VI

I should like to end this article on somewhat firmer ground by suggesting that our knowledge of the sixteenth-century conflict between Protestants and Catholics over the dispensability of the text in Leviticus helps us better to understand Hamlet's absolute allegiance to the word. Claudius, in the prayer-scene, acknowledges his own “shuffling” (III. iii. 61), recognizes his failure to circumvent divine law, and comes close to entering into a deeper awareness of the inwardness of true renovation, before falling silent and finally confessing failure. His case has merit only in this corrupt world, where power and wealth buy out the law (III. iii. 57-60). For Hamlet, of course, God's Levitical prohibition against incest is absolute, fixed for all time, and indispensable by any worldly authority. The “better wisdoms” of Denmark, “which have freely gone / With this affair along” (I. ii. 15-16), are merely a sign that “shuffling” and temporizing are general in the state.

It is interesting to remember in this connection that belief in the absolute severance of the marital union by death supports the Catholic position of dispensability. We have already seen that Claudius, from the start, relies on the power of death to break King Hamlet's hold on Gertrude. Nicholas Harpsfield affirms the Pope's right to dispense from the Levitical prohibition and brands as untruth the Protestant idea that the wife is the flesh of her dead husband:

This unity is to be counted while the husband and wife do live and no longer, for as long as they live the wife's privie member is accounted his according to the saying of St. Paule. The woman hath no power of her owne body, but the husband. … Now the husband being dead, it is no longer his member, and therefore no discovering of his foulness, but it is now the foulness of him that hath married her.⁵¹

Hamlet, of course, considers the marital bond that makes Gertrude and King Hamlet one flesh to be indissoluble, even by death (IV. iii. 50-51). One imagines that he would oppose any second marriage, holding that “a good widowe ought to suppose, that her husbande is not utterly dead, but liveth, both with life of his soule, which is the very life, and beside with her remembraunce. For our freends live with us … if the lively image of them be imprinted in our harts. … And if we forget them, then they die towards us.”⁵²

His father's namesake, Hamlet embodies the act of memory that keeps the old King alive; he reminds us constantly that such memory is an ethical imperative.⁵³ This is what animates his appeal to Gertrude's conscience in the closet scene. Earlier, he has relied on the tenacity of memory to maintain and strengthen his resolve to avenge his father's death (I. v. 95 ff.). One can imagine the pain with which Hamlet hears the player-king complain, perhaps in a line that Hamlet has “set down” and inserted himself, that “Purpose is but the slave to memory” (III. ii. 180). We can well understand, even without recourse to a sixteenth-century controversy, why Hamlet must remember. Yet this specific debate on the dispensability of the incest prohibition provides doctrinal justification for both remembering and not remembering. Hamlet and Claudius thus stand even more starkly opposed to one another.

It has not been the purpose of this article to belittle twentieth-century interpretations of incest. Jones's study of the workings of repressed desire on Hamlet's “unconscious” continues to be valuable—though Claude Lévi-Strauss's more recent definition of incest as “the overvaluation of kinship” is droll in a public-relations sense that Claudius himself would have appreciated. I have only sought to suggest that a theologically orthodox interpretation of the incest prohibition can lead to increased understanding of the play. Conflicting Scriptural passages, together with their commentaries, help to identify Claudius' role as a travesty of the levir's role. They also help to explain the intensity of Hamlet's antipathy toward his “uncle-father and aunt-mother.”

Notes

1. Hamlet and Oedipus (1949; rpt. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1954), p. 99.

2. Shakespearean Tragedy: Its Art and Its Christian Premises (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1969), p. 231.

3. What Happens in Hamlet (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1937), p. 42.

4. Unless otherwise noted, all parenthetic Biblical references in the text are to the Geneva Bible (1560). For evidence of Shakespeare's use of this version in Hamlet, see Richmond Noble, Shakespeare's Biblical Knowledge (London: SPCK, 1935), pp. 66 ff.

5. My source for all quotations from Shakespeare is The Complete Pelican Shakespeare, gen. ed. Alfred Harbage (Baltimore: Penguin, 1969).

6. See “Affinity,” New Catholic Encyclopedia (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967); “Affinité,” in Dictionnaire de Droit Canonique, I, cols. 264-85; and “Affinita,” in Enciclopedia Cattolica, I, cols. 366-68.

7. A Treatise on the Pretended Divorce Between Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon [1556], ed. Nicholas Pocock (Westminster: Camden Society, 1878), p. 98.

8. Institutes of the Christian Religion (IV. xix. 37), ed. John T. McNeill and Ford Lewis Battles (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960), II, 1484.

9. For canon law on questions of affinity and consanguinity, see Chapter VII of J. J. Scarisbrick's magisterial biography Henry VIII (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1968), pp. 163-97, to which this paper is heavily indebted. See also the entries, cited in note 5, on “Affinity,” “Affinité,” and “Affinita.”

10. Harry Levin, The Question of Hamlet (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1959), p. 33.

11. This is the Douai-Rheims translation (1582, 1609).

12. Saint Augustine, Retractationum, Patrologia Latina (Paris: J.-P. Migne, 1877), XXXII, 633: “Lex autem filios etiam mortuis adoptabat, jubens ut fratris defuncto semen ex eadem frater uxorem, et fratri defuncto semen ex eadem suscitaret.”

13. Seriatim: Cardinal Cajetan, cited in Andrew Willet's Hexapla in Leviticum (London, 1631), p. 425; William Gouge, Of Domesticall Duties (London, 1622), p. 186; John Weemse, An Exposition of the Ceremoniall Lawes of Moses (London, 1632), p. 195.

14. Note on Mark xii. 19 ff., in The New Testament, tr. the English college then resident in Rheims (Antwerp: D. Veruliet, 1600), p. 121.

15. R. G. Abrahams, “Some Aspects of Levirate,” in The Character of Kinship, ed. Jack Goody (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1973), p. 167.

16. Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown, “Introduction,” in African Kinship and Marriage, ed. Daryll Forde and A. R. Radcliffe-Brown (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1950), p. 64. Abrahams, cited above, treats the difficulties faced by social anthropologists who try to discriminate between widow-inheritance and the true levirate. He sees “an element of paradox in this situation, where such different institutions are said to be demonstrative of a single principle” (p. 166).

17. S. R. Driver, Deuteronomy, The International Critical Commentary, gen. eds. S. R. Driver, Alfred Plummer, C. A. Briggs (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1895), pp. 281-84.

18. Andrew Willet, Hexapla in Leviticum, p. 425.

19. Nicholas Harpsfield, A Treatise on the Pretended Divorce, p. 87.

20. Ibid., p. 145. See also Sir James George Frazer, Totemism and Exogamy (London: Macmillan, 1910), I, 502.

21. Henry Ainsworth, Annotations Upon the Fifth Booke of Moses, called Deuteronomy (1619; rpt. London, 1639), p. 114.

22. “On the Value of Hamlet,” in Reinterpretations of Elizabethan Drama, ed. Norman Rabkin, Selected Papers of the English Institute (New York and London: Columbia Univ. Press, 1969), p. 149.

23. An Explication of the Judiciall Lawes of Moses (London, 1632), p. 121. See also the anonymous sixteenth-century tract, “A Glasse of the Truthe,” in Records of the Reformation: The Divorce 1527-1533, ed. Nicholas Pocock (Oxford: Clarendon, 1870), II, 391.

24. Annotations Upon … Deuteronomy, p. 115. See also Harpsfield, Treatise on the Pretended Divorce, p. 142; Martin Luther, Lectures on Deuteronomy, Works, ed. Jaroslav Pelikan (Saint Louis: Concordia, 1960). Luther allegorizes the text of Deuteronomy, identifying the widow with the “synagog,” the deceased brother with Christ, and the levir with the Christian community that teaches in Christ's name: “thus, although we teach people, we teach only in the name of Christ, and children born by the Word shall not be called Pauline or Apollonian or Petrine but only Christian” (p. 250).

25. John Diodati, Pious and Learned Annotations upon the Holy Bible (London, 1651), Deut. xxv. 5: “this thing was in use before Moses time by some ancient custome ordained by God, and passed over from father to son, Gen. xxxviii. 8: but here it is established by the written law. …”

26. Willet, Hexapla in Leviticum, p. 510.

27. Martin Noth, Leviticus: A Commentary (London: SCM, 1965), p. 134.

28. Fratricide Punished, III. vi., in Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, ed. Geoffrey Bullough (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1973), VII, 145-46.

29. For other examples of such shading in Hamlet, see E. A. J. Honigmann, “The Politics in Hamlet and ‘The World of the Play,’” in Hamlet: Stratford-upon-Avon Studies, 5, ed. John Russell Brown and Bernard Harris (London: Edward Arnold, 1963), pp. 129-47; and William Empson, “Hamlet When New,” Sewanee Review, 61 (1953), 18 ff.

30. William Tyndale's correct translation of the verse in Deuteronomy is an admirable exception: “the wyfe of the dead shall not be geven out unto a straunger: but hir brotherlawe shall goo in unto her and take her to wife” (Five Books of Moses called The Pentateuch, 1530). Indeed, Tyndale's exegetical integrity enforces a position of moderation on the question of Henry VIII's divorce. Given the tenor of his exposé of prelatical abuse in his earliest known work, The Practice of Prelates (1530), one would expect Tyndale to defend the divorce on the grounds of the Levitical prohibition. Yet even in this anti-Catholic polemic, he contends at some length that the terms of the levirate marriage in Deuteronomy should protect Catherine's status as the King's lawful wife. He notes that the texts in Leviticus and Deuteronomy “seem contrary, the one forbidding, the other commanding, a man to take his brother's wife”; he concludes that the levirate “is not a permission, but a flat commandment.” See Henry Walter's Parker Society edition of The Practice of Prelates (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1849), pp. 323-27.

31. [Anonymous], “A Glasse of the Truthe,” in Records of the Reformation, II, 393-94.

32. Ibid., p. 394. See also John Calvin, Commentaries on the Four Last Books of Moses, trans. C. W. Bingham (1850; rpt. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1950), III, 177. For the Catholic position, see John Fisher, De Causa Matrimonii Serenissimi regis Angliae liber (Alcalá, 1530), fol. 7 ff. Fisher cites the following authorities who understand that the Deuteronomical precept applies to a real brother: Origen, Hesychius, Damascene, Chrysostom, Eusebius, Raoul de Flaix, Rabbi Moses the Egyptian, Lyra, Alphonsus, Jerome, Hilary, and Africanus.

33. See contemporary formulations by Juan Luis Vives, Apologia sive Confutatio … (1531); “A Glasse of the Truthe,” Records of the Reformation, II 391; Harpsfield, Treatise on the Pretended Divorce, p. 37. Scarisbrick, in Henry VIII, pp. 163-97, cites many additional contemporary sources. Among the Church Fathers who treat the problem, see Saint Augustine, Questionum in Heptateuchum, Patrologia Latina, XXXIV, 705; Saint John Chrysostom, De non iterando conjugio, Patrologia Graeca, XLVIII, 609-20; Tertullian, Treatises on Marriage and Remarriage (Westminster, Md.: Newman Press, 1951), p. 84.

34. Raphael Holinshed, Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland (1587; rpt. London: J. Johnson, 1808), III, 771. See the “Determinations of diverse universities …,” pp. 767-72.

35. Thomas Beard, The Theatre of Gods Judgements (London, 1597), p. 329. In his commentary on Leviticus xviii, Gervase Babington forces the laws against sexual contamination into a nationalist context. He sees the French, Italians, Spanish, and Turks as modern equivalents of the Canaanites. See his Comfortable Notes upon the Five Bookes of Moses, Works (London, 1622), p. 393.

36. John Foxe, Acts and Monuments (1563; rpt. London: Stationers Company, 1684), II, 276.

37. Jean de Lorin, cited (and disputed) by Willet, Hexapla in Leviticum, p. 447. See also Lorin's Commentarii in Leviticum (Lugdun: H. Cardon, 1619). pp. 546 ff.

38. Hugh Latimer, Sermons and Remains, ed. George Elwes Corrie, Parker Society (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1845), p. 340.

39. Ibid., p. 341.

40. See George Hayward Joyce, S. J., Christian Marriage: An Historical and Doctrinal Study (London and New York: Sheed and Ward, 1933), pp. 527 ff.

41. Andrew Willet, Synopsis in Papismi (London, 1594), p. 755.

42. De Causa, fol. 38^v. See also Harpsfield, who cites John Bacon on this point, in Treatise on the Pretended Divorce, p. 21.

43. De Matrimonia [1531], Relecciones Teologicas, ed. Luis G. Alonso Getino (Madrid, 1934), II, 440-504.

44. Fisher, De Causa, fol. 37^v. Harpsfield, Treatise on the Pretended Divorce, pp. 99-100.

45. King Henry VIII, ed. R. A. Foakes, Arden Edition (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1957), p. 80 n.

46. William Forrest, The History of Grisild the Second: A Narrative, in Verse, of the Divorce of Queen Katharine of Aragon, ed. W. D. Macray (London: Whittingham and Wilkins, 1875).

47. Frank Kermode, “What is Shakespeare's Henry VIII About?” Durham University Journal, NS 9 (1947-48), 54.

48. Willet, Hexapla in Leviticum, pp. 447-49.

49. Conscience and the King (London: Chatto & Windus, 1953), p. 46. A lucid explanation of the incest prohibition appears in Joseph Quincy Adams' edition of Hamlet (Cambridge, Mass.: Riverside, 1929), pp. 199, 278-79. See also Richmond Noble, Shakespeare's Biblical Knowledge, p. 205; John W. Draper, The Hamlet of Shakespeare's Audience (Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 1938), p. 114; Richard Flatter, Hamlet's Father (London: Heinemann, 1949), p. 26.

50. John Foxe, Acts and Monuments, II, 277.

51. Treatise on the Pretended Divorce, p. 99.

52. Juan Luis Vives, The Instruction of a Christian Woman, trans. Richard Hyrde (1529; rpt. London, 1592), p. 424.

53. The most recent of the many studies treating memory in the play is Theresa Suriano Ormsby-Lennon's “Piccolo, Ma Con Gran Vagghezza: A New Source for Hamlet?” Library Chronicle, 41 (1977), 119-48, esp. 135-39.