SOURCE: Sinfield, Alan. “Hamlet's Special Province.” Shakespeare Survey 33 (1980): 89-97.

[In the following essay, Sinfield discusses the connection between Hamlet's reference to “a special providence in the fall of a sparrow” and the question of whether the play's conception of the world is pagan or Christian.]

We defy augury: there is 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—the readiness is all. Since no man owes of aught he leaves, what is't to leave betimes? Let be.

(Hamlet, v, ii, 210-16)¹

[God is] a Governor and Preserver, and that, not by producing a kind of general motion in the machine of the globe as well as in each of its parts, but by a special Providence sustaining, cherishing, superintending, all the things which he has made, to the very minutest, even to a sparrow.

(Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion)²

Fate guides us, and it was settled at the first hour of birth what length of time remains for each. Cause is linked with cause, and all public and private issues are directed by a long sequence of events. Therefore everything should be endured with fortitude, since things do not, as we suppose, simply happen—they all come.

(Seneca, ‘De Providentia’)³

The first passage quoted, where Hamlet declares that ‘there is a special providence in the fall of a sparrow’, is of key importance in the longstanding critical debate about Hamlet and Christianity. The way we relate it to the attitudes represented in the quotations from Calvin and Seneca bears crucially upon our choice between three rival interpretations of the play. Bradley recognises Hamlet's phraseology here as Christian but regards its tone and the play generally as pagan in implication: Hamlet expresses ‘that kind of religious resignation which, however beautiful in one aspect, really deserves the name of fatalism rather than that of faith in Providence, because it is not united to any determination to do what is believed to be the will of Providence.’⁴ Roland Mushat Frye believes these lines show Hamlet ‘relying upon an unmistakably Christian providence’ and hence achieving true faith.⁵ Roy W. Battenhouse agrees with Frye that the play has a Christian tendency but also with Bradley that Hamlet's own attitude is unChristian: ‘A biblical echo, the sparrow reference, when found in this upside-down context, alerts us to the tragic parody in Hamlet's version of readiness.’⁶ Hamlet is either a pagan in a pagan play, a good Christian in a Christian play, or a sinner in a Christian play.

A Senecan frame of reference seems appropriate in the first four acts of the play, for Hamlet's great need is Stoic tranquillity of mind. He values Horatio because he is ‘A man that Fortune's buffets and rewards / Hast ta'en with equal thanks; … not a pipe for Fortune's finger / To sound what stop she please … not passion's slave’ (III, ii, 65-70). By subduing his emotions Horatio frees himself from the effects of fortune and becomes the Stoics' wise and happy man.

It is not the principle of revenge which troubles Hamlet, but the achievement of a state of mind where he can do something coherent about it. Seneca declares,

The good man will perform his duties undisturbed and unafraid; and he will in such a way do all that is worthy of a good man as to do nothing that is unworthy of a man. My father is being murdered—I will defend him; he is slain—I will avenge him, not because I grieve, but because it is my duty.

(Moral Essays, ‘De Ira’, I, xii, 2)

Hamlet cannot act so calmly; he cannot focus sufficiently coolly upon any matter to determine a policy and carry it through. His most sustained venture is the mouse-trap play but it is all brilliant improvisation. He is nervous and excited before and wildly exuberant afterwards; he vaunts, ‘Now could I drink hot blood’ (III, ii, 380), but spares the praying King and strikes out recklessly, killing Polonius. Though he has the evidence he sought he leaves at Claudius's command for England. The issue which oppresses Hamlet is not how or whether to be revenged, but how to do anything purposeful at all. In the face of the manifold injunctions, distractions, plots and crimes which assail him he can hardly hold himself single-mindedly to any action.

Hamlet presents himself as an unsuccessful Stoic in his first exchange with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. They perhaps engaged in light-hearted philosophical banter as students, but here the subtext is their manoeuvring to discover each other's purposes. Rosencrantz denies that Denmark is a prison; Hamlet replies, ‘Why, then, 'tis none to you; for there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so’ (II, ii, 248-50). This characteristically Stoic notion usually has a contrary import—that one can be happy and free if the mind chooses. Rosencrantz should be amused but is determined to turn the discussion to ambition. Hamlet replies, more earnestly, ‘O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams’ (II, ii, 253-55). Compare the Chorus in Seneca's Thyestes: ‘It is the mynde that onely makes a king … A kyng hee is that feareth nought at all. / Eche man him selfe this kyngdome geeves at hand.’⁷

It is of course Stoic to entertain suicide as a solution to intolerable emotional pressure. Horatio, at Hamlet's death, terms himself ‘more an antique Roman than a Dane’ (V, ii, 333). The secular manner in which Hamlet discusses it (III, i, 56-88) recalls the disputes between Oedipus and Antigone in Seneca's Phoenissae (1-319), and Deianira, the Nurse and Hyllas in Hercules Oetaeus (842-1030). For Seneca it is indeed a ‘question’ whether it is nobler to suffer or to kill oneself. Death is always the way out, yet it is base to flinch: ‘The brave and wise man should not beat a hasty retreat from life.’⁸ His main theme is that it is superstitious and irrational to fear death or what might follow it, but such anxieties preoccupy Hamlet, who again falls short of Stoic detachment.

For Seneca, the man who achieves Stoic self-mastery is godlike:

the wise man is next-door neighbour to the gods and like a god in all save his mortality. As he struggles and presses on towards those things that are lofty, well-ordered, undaunted, that flow on with even and harmonious current, that are untroubled, kindly, adapted to the public good, beneficial both to himself and to others, the wise man will covet nothing low, will never repine.

(Moral Essays, ‘De Constantia’, viii, 2)

Hamlet is perplexed and disillusioned at the failure of this ideal in others and in himself. Man is said to be ‘in apprehension, how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?’ (II, ii, 303-5). He ponders:

Sure he that made us with such large discourse,
Looking before and after, gave us not
That capability and godlike reason
To fust in us unus'd.

(IV, iv, 36-9)

But Hamlet is far from such cool judgement and unimpressed by the divine qualities of himself or those around him.

The plausibility of the godlike Stoic hero is questioned in similar terms by Marston in the Antonio plays, which seem strongly to have influenced Hamlet. In Antonio and Mellida Andrugio affects indifference to the loss of his kingdom but falls at once into a rage when it is mentioned: ‘Name not the Genoese; that very word / Unkings me quite, makes me vile passion's slave’ (IV, i, 68-9). In Antonio's Revenge Pandulpho remains tranquil about the murder of his son for many scenes, but suddenly declares, ‘Man will break out, despite philosophy. … I spake more than a god, / Yet am less than a man’ (IV, iii, 69-75).⁹ In fact the inadequacy of Stoicism is implicit in Seneca's writings, where alongside the godlike, rational man is an acute awareness of the difficulty of withstanding the adversities which afflict mankind. Miriam T. Griffin terms it ‘the schizophrenia endemic in Stoic philosophy, with its vision of the sapiens and its code of behaviour for the imperfectus’.¹⁰ In Seneca's plays there are almost no successful Stoics. The eschewal of passion is in theory a stance of strength and self-sufficiency, but it can easily seem a weak, fallback position—a retreat from the intolerable.

What is at issue in Hamlet is optimistic humanism—that strand in Renaissance thought which exalted man's capacity to achieve, through the exercise of rational powers, a moral stature which the incautious termed godlike. Even a man of Hamlet's intelligence and sensitivity cannot assert himself in this world and gain a workable degree of self-sufficiency, but is overwhelmed by emotional turmoil and the follies and crimes of his fellow men. When Ophelia laments his instability—‘that noble and most sovereign reason, / Like sweet bells jangled, out of time and harsh’ (III, i, 157-8)—she draws attention to the collapse of a whole world view.

It is usual and proper to contrast Hamlet with the other young men in the play. But we should notice also that Laertes is no more successful (he kills Hamlet but wishes he had not), and although Fortinbras is presumably elected king of Denmark, this is by chance not design—the throne he and his father fought and schemed for is gained not through their godlike qualities but by default. Only the stolid Horatio approaches the ideal, and when his test comes at the end of the play he is hardly dissuaded from suicide. It seems impossible to act meaningfully in a universe tragically ill-adapted to human kind. The only dignified option seems to be that offered in the plays of Seneca, Webster and Ford: a heroic death.

Thus far we have placed Hamlet in a secular context, but Protestant thinkers anticipated the failure of Stoicism. Calvin did not expect fallen men to achieve rationality and equanimity, let alone be godlike; he termed ‘absurd’ the Stoic hero ‘who, divested of humanity, was affected in the same way by adversity and prosperity, grief and joy; or rather, like a stone, was not affected by anything’ (Institutes, III, viii, 9). The error of ‘philosophers generally’ is that ‘they maintain that the intellect is endued with reason, the best guide to a virtuous and happy life, provided it duly avails itself of its excellence, and exerts the power with which it is naturally endued’ (Institutes, II, ii, 2). According to the Protestant analysis, we should not be surprised or disappointed at the collapse of the Stoic ideal in Hamlet.

Upon his return from England Hamlet seems to have accepted this view. He no longer expects to achieve mastery of himself or his circumstances. In the Graveyard he meditates upon a jester's skull, an emblem of the limits which confound mortal aspirations. The cause of his change seems to be the extraordinary turns events have taken—the appearance of the Ghost when Claudius seemed secure, the arrival of the players prompting the test of the king, Hamlet's felicitous discovery of the plot against his life and above all his amazing delivery through the pirates. The latter especially is so improbable, and so unnecessary to the plot, that we may suppose Shakespeare wishes the audience also to be impressed with the special interventions of providence. Hence when Hamlet describes how he discovered Claudius's letter and changed it he attributes the whole sequence to providence: ‘There's a divinity that shapes our ends, / Rough-hew them how we will’ (V, ii, 10-11). He was able to seal the altered instructions: ‘Why, even in that was heaven ordinant’ (V, ii, 48). Thus he reaches the assertion that ‘there is a special providence in the fall of a sparrow’ (V, ii, 212). In phraseology at least Stoic doctrine has been superseded by Christian.

The choice of Calvin to represent contemporary Protestant opinion should no longer need arguing. Amongst historians his influence upon the Elizabethan Church is scarcely disputed and several literary scholars have recently related it to plays of the period.¹¹ Calvin is particularly relevant here because he insisted upon the doctrine of providence in the strong form which it takes at this point in Hamlet. One axis of his theology is the impotence of fallen humanity; the other is God's total power to govern the world in accord with his divine (though incomprehensible) plan.

Moreover, it is against Stoic fate or fortune that Calvin is arguing when he speaks of special providence and the fall of a sparrow—both in the quotation with which we began and again during the supporting argument:

The Christian … will have no doubt that a special providence is awake for his preservation, and will not suffer anything to happen that will not turn to his good and safety. … Hence, our Saviour, after declaring that even a sparrow falls not to the ground without the will of his Father, immediately makes the application, that being more valuable than many sparrows, we ought to consider that God provides more carefully for us.

(Institutes, I, xvii, 6)

In Calvin's Latin the words are usually ‘singularis providentia’; his French has alternately ‘la providence singulière’ and ‘la providence spéciale’; the translation by Thomas Norton (1561) has both ‘singular providence’ and ‘special providence’ (see I, xvi, 1, 4, 7).

Whether the allusion and phraseology shared by Calvin and Hamlet necessarily imply predestination is not entirely clear. Christ's remark about the sparrow is problematic for Christians who assert free will—Erasmus in his argument against Luther is obliged to take it as ‘hyperbole’.¹² Bertram Joseph notices the term ‘special providence’ in several divines (though not Calvin) and thinks it consistent with free will, but he misses the dominant thrust of the phrase and the Reformation when he explains, ‘Calvinists, too, could agree … that God through His special providence creates the opportunity, and the individual, if he is the right man, will take it’.¹³ But Calvin and Luther alike believed that God has predetermined all events, and of the theologians Joseph mentions—William Perkins, Hugh Latimer, Joseph Hall and Lancelot Andrewes—all but the last took the same view. This is the doctrine Elizabethans generally understood in the tenth, eleventh and seventeenth of the Thirty-Nine Articles. When it was challenged at Cambridge in 1595 Archbishop Whitgift (no puritan) sponsored the Lambeth Articles to affirm it; they had no official status but indicate the position of the Church establishment.

Hamlet's words sound like predestination: ‘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’ (V, ii, 213-15); ‘ordinant’ (V, ii, 48) means ‘directing, controlling’. Notice also that in the ‘bad’ First Quarto Hamlet is made to say, ‘theres a predestiuate prouidence in the fall of a sparrow’. Even if this is no more than a faulty memorial construct it shows how one well-placed contemporary understood Shakespeare's meaning. However, my argument does not require that we take Hamlet's phrase as Calvinistic in the fullest sense, only that we see Hamlet proposing a high degree of divine intervention and suggesting predestination.

We seem to have arrived at a Protestant interpretation of Hamlet: the prince recognises the folly of humanistic aspiration and the controlling power of providence, and the shape of the action, with purposes eventually falling on the inventors' heads, confirms it. Some readers may wonder why, if the play is governed by providence, it is manifestly composed of ‘carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts’ (V, ii, 373) with very little of love, mercy and forgiveness. At this point our attention to Calvin is surely justified, for his account of earthly life is as grim as that of any tragedian:

Various diseases ever and anon attack us: at one time pestilence rages; at another we are involved in all the calamities of war. Frost and hail, destroying the promise of the year, cause sterility, which reduces us to penury; wife, parents, children, relatives, are carried off by death; our house is destroyed by fire. These are the events which make men curse their life, detest the day of their birth, execrate the light of heaven, even censure God, and (as they are eloquent in blasphemy) charge him with cruelty and injustice.

(Institutes, III, vii, 10)

Calvin does not repudiate this description of the human condition; nor does he throw any stress upon the consolation of an after-life. Instead he asserts through the concept of providence that all is due to the just will of God.

However dreadful and apparently unfair the affliction, ‘the rule of piety is, that the hand of God is the ruler and arbiter of the fortunes of all, and, instead of rushing on with thoughtless violence, dispenses good and evil with perfect regularity’ (Institutes, III, vii, 10). Calvin sustains this statement mainly by insisting that all men are fallen and sinful and so deserve the worst that can happen to them. Nevertheless, he distinguishes the sufferings of the wicked from those of believers. In the former case, ‘God is to be understood as taking vengeance on his enemies, by displaying his anger against them, confounding, scattering, and annihilating them’; in the latter ‘it is not properly punishment or vengeance, but correction and admonition’ (Institutes, III, iv, 31). But all receive afflictions. Even theologians who denied predestination believed with Calvin that human suffering is caused by God intervening in the world to afflict and punish good and bad men. Lancelot Andrewes in his ‘Sermon Preached at Chiswick in the Time of Pestilence’ (1603) refers to providence and the sparrow to show that God must be the cause of the plague. He concludes, ‘So our inventions beget sin, sin provokes the wrath of God, the wrath of God sends the Plague among us.’¹⁴

The violent and punitive providence of Calvin and even of Andrewes could certainly be the moving force behind the diseased action of Shakespeare's play. Thus it is that Hamlet can claim, with the deaths of his father, Polonius, Ophelia and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in mind, ‘there is a special providence in the fall of a sparrow’. That is how God was believed to manage affairs.

So Hamlet appears to be a Christian play in the Elizabethan sense of the term. We are slow to recognise this because we have been taught a more amiable conception of the Christian God. Indeed, dwelling upon the rigorous of Protestant doctrine produces an intriguing solution to the question of how Christian Elizabethans wrote and enjoyed such bleak tragedies. Perhaps it is not that they understood the plays differently from the modern reader: they too saw in Hamlet man's feeble attempts to act purposefully in a hostile world. But what they perceived as the working out in typical fashion of God's mysterious providential plan strikes us as bitterly tragic. We read the plays similarly but place them differently in relation to a shifting concept of Christianity.

A whole group of plays might fall within this insight. The Jew of Malta, The Spanish Tragedy, Richard III, Antonio's Revenge, Macbeth and The Revenger's Tragedy all suggest by the intricate, violent and inexorable way in which events work out that a deity of the Protestant stamp is in control, and the characters often invoke him. They call upon God to destroy the wicked and eventually he does; we need not take ironically their devout satisfaction. The sufferings of innocent by-standers are instances of the crosses we are required to bear.

Yet such an interpretation is not satisfactory for Hamlet, and the difficulties emanate from the very speech about providence and the sparrow. The issue is not the killing of the king, the moral status of which seems to be uncertain. Most Reformation Protestants would be pleased at the violent death of a manifest wrongdoer like Claudius, but they would question the action of the killer. Calvin was opposed to private vengeance though he believed that God works through it. However, like Aquinas, he was sympathetic to tyrannicide, at least when performed by lesser magistrates who ‘by the ordinance of God’ are the ‘appointed guardians’ of the people (Institutes, IV, xx, 31). Tudor propaganda, of course, saw rebellion as the worst of evils, but the Dutch and Huguenots developed from Calvin's hint a complete theory of controlled revolt. Already in the closet scene Hamlet regards himself as Heaven's ‘scourge and minister’ (III, iv, 175), and just before the appearance of Osric he recalls to Horatio Claudius's manifold crimes and asks,

                                                  is't not perfect conscience
To quit him with this arm? And is't not to be damn'd
To let this canker of our nature come
In further evil?

(V, ii, 67-70)

Politically, ethically, theologically it can be argued either way.

The more pressing problem is Bradley's sense that the tone and implication of Hamlet's speech, however Christian its terminology, are fatalistic. Some commentators feel that, having recognised God's controlling hand, Hamlet's proper course is to do nothing. This was not Protestant doctrine. Although predestination means that individual actions can make no difference Calvinists, always afraid of antinomianism, urged that the true Christian should show his delight in God's will by co-operating as far as he is able (Institutes, I, xvii, 3, 4). Hamlet believes that providence wants Claudius removed and that he should do it—‘the interim is mine’, he says (V, ii, 73). However, ‘the readiness is all’ refers not to action but to death. Hamlet plays with Osric (surely this scene is purposely desultory), competes with Laertes and makes no plans against the king. The final killing occurs in a burst of passionate inspiration and when Hamlet himself is, in effect, slain.

Consider also the context of the speech. Hamlet is not making a general statement about the rightness of God's control of the world, but sweeping aside Horatio's very reasonable suspicion about the duel. Thus he ignores Calvin's argument that ‘the Lord has furnished men with the arts of deliberation and caution, that they may employ them in subservience to his providence, in the preservation of their life’ (Institutes, I, xvii, 4). Hamlet's thought has a contrary tendency: he sees no point in troubling about what will happen. And this is implicit in the tone of the speech. Editors disagree about the last line; the Second Quarto has ‘since no man of ought he leaves, knowes what ist to leave betimes, let be’. However we emend this, it sounds fatalistic.

Hamlet acknowledges divine determination of events, but without enthusiasm. Our theme turns back upon itself, for his resignation, like his earlier godlike aspiration, is Senecan, Stoic world weariness is felt despite the distinctively Protestant phraseology; the context, the tone of the speech and Hamlet's subsequent inactivity all recall the quotation from ‘De Providentia’ with which we began: ‘it was settled at the first hour of birth what length of time remains for each. … Therefore everything should be endured with fortitude, since things do not, as we suppose, simply happen—they all come.’ Playing upon the ambivalence in Seneca's work, Shakespeare is developing the sense of futility which often underlies the theory of rational self-sufficiency. And this is in the very teeth of Calvinist doctrine for, as I have observed, it is actually whilst repudiating Stoic fate that Calvin alludes to providence and the sparrow. The Stoics ‘feign a universal providence, which does not condescend to take special care of every creature’ (Institutes, I, xvii, 6; see also I, xvi, 8), and it is against such an impersonal force that Calvin and Hamlet maintain a ‘special providence’ which cares for every individual in every detail of his life.

The intricate working out of events obliges Hamlet to recognise the precise control of the Protestant God but he does not find in himself the joyful response theologians anticipated. Calvin distinguished Stoic patience, which accepts what happens because ‘so it must be’, and Christian, which cheerfully embraces God's will ‘with calm and grateful minds’ (Institutes, III, viii, 11). Hamlet contemplates God's intimate and pervasive direction of the universe with only Stoic patience. It makes him wonder; temporarily, when he is sending Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to their doom, it exhilarates him; but ultimately it depresses him. ‘There is a special providence in the fall of a sparrow’ and in the corruption and suffering of Denmark, and it inspires in Hamlet not joyful co-operation but weary acquiescence. His attitude provokes the thought that the world is unjustly governed by such a God.

Commentators have disagreed about Hamlet's attitude to providence because it is confused, but I believe purposefully. Shakespeare is exploiting the contradictions in Stoicism and the embarrassments in Calvinism. For those who assert a beneficent order in the universe there are two alternatives with the problem of evil. One is that God allows considerable freedom to his creation; the danger here is that things begin to get out of control, the sense of God's concern slips away and we might as well regard events as absurd or the work of blind fortune. The other alternative is that God is in complete control, but then he has to assume an awkwardly immediate responsibility for evil. Seneca tries to slide between these two positions, partly by saying different things at different times, partly by proposing controlling gods who do not concern themselves with details.

The dilemma should trouble all Christians but Calvin confronts it head on: his doctrine of providence asserts defiantly that God directs everything and that he is perfectly good. All unpleasantness in the world occurs immediately and justly by God's will, and mere men should not expect to understand. Yet Calvin tries to explain, and runs repeatedly into difficulties. For instance, is it fair that God refuses to allow a man like Claudius (or Dr Faustus) to repent?

To some it seems harsh, and at variance with the divine mercy, utterly to deny forgiveness to any who betake themselves to it. This is easily disposed of. It is not said that pardon will be refused if they turn to the Lord, but it is altogether denied that they can turn to repentance, inasmuch as for their ingratitude they are struck by the just judgment of God with eternal blindness.

(Institutes, III, iii, 24)

Calvin falls back continually upon assertion and divine inscrutability: ‘The will of God is the supreme rule of righteousness, so that everything which he wills must be held to be righteous by the mere fact of his willing it’ (Institutes, III, xxiii, 2).

Calvin argues rigorously from his first principles and with ample scriptural support, and creates a superbly self-contained system. But he cannot make it satisfy ordinary, common sense morality. It is not that one cannot easily assemble signs of the operations of such a deity in the world; what is unacceptable is the demand that we marvel at its goodness and mercy. My contention is that the paradoxes of Protestant theology provoked alarm and confusion and that it is apparent in Hamlet and other tragedies.

Evidence of humane objections to Protestant orthodoxy ranges from Andrewes's complaint that the Lambeth Articles make God appear unjust to the development by General Baptists from about 1600 of a doctrine of universal salvation. Robert Burton (who, it may be noted, condemns in Calvin's manner Seneca's concept of fate)¹⁵ describes fully, among the ‘Causes of Despair’ in religion, how Calvin's favourite Biblical sentences

terrify the souls of many; election, predestination, reprobation, preposterously conceived, offend divers, with a deal of foolish presumption, curiosity, needless speculation, contemplation, solicitude, wherein they trouble and puzzle themselves about those questions of grace, free will, perseverance, God's secrets.

(Anatomy of Melancholy, III, 398-9)

Burton himself seems to hanker after a liberal theology: ‘For how can he be merciful that shall condemn any creature to eternal unspeakable punishment … But these absurd paradoxes are exploded by our Church, we teach otherwise’—and he goes on to restate Calvinist orthodoxy (III, 423-4).

Surely we cannot overestimate the impact upon the Reformation mind of the Church's insistence upon attributing good and bad alike to a special providence whose justice cannot be demonstrated to the ordinary intellect. It has much to do, I believe, with the peculiar theological stance of many Elizabethan tragedies. We have observed that characters often call upon a violent deity whose controlling presence is eventually confirmed by the intricate working out of events. At the same time, the beneficence of this system is brought into question by our sympathy for the characters, by the provocative interweaving of Jove, revenge, fate and fortune with Christian divinities, by a pervasive fatalism and by the harshness of some attitudes attributed to the deity—in Antonio's Revenge, for instance, the ghost of Andrugio declares, ‘Now looks down providence / T'attend the last act of my son's revenge’ (V, i, 10-11). We may be able to demonstrate from the Institutes the broad compatibility of such plays with Protestantism but we cannot feel comforted by the world they present. Hence the appeal of Seneca to Elizabethan dramatists: Stoicism offers complex variations upon Christianity in respect of its estimate of man and its conception of divine power. All this manifests a deep unease with Christian doctrine as it was customarily preached. These writers have gone half-way with Calvin: they are convinced that men are fallen and in a fallen world but have only nominal confidence in God's redemptive goodness. They lurch back towards fatalism; it is a recipe for tragedy.

Hamlet presents this dissatisfaction with orthodox theology in an unusually coherent form. By undermining humanistic Stoicism and positing a controlling deity in words deriving from Calvin the play takes us to the brink of a Protestant affirmation, but Hamlet's fatalistic attitude encourages us to question divine justice. We understand and respect his reluctance to co-operate with a divinity whose doings are so arbitrary and overwhelming. Senecan resignation seems a reasonable response.

It will be felt that I have been teasing out strands in popular plays that only a theologian would recognise in the theatre. This is true: the disquiet of these writers with Protestant doctrine was probably scarcely formulated. Their plays do not present a coherent philosophy but a confused sense of alarm and wonderment at the mysterious ways of providence. However, Marlowe for one seems fully conscious of the distinction between pagan and Christian and how it may be used to suggest a critique of providence. The Jew of Malta concludes, ‘So march away; and let due praise be given, / Neither to Fate nor Fortune, but to Heaven.’¹⁶ Ferneze prefers Christian doctrine to pagan and attributes events to God's providence, but the action makes us wonder whether fate or fortune is not a more likely presiding deity. In Hamlet Christian statements supersede pagan ones in a theologically precise form, but the action remains ambiguous.

Notes

1. Plays by Shakespeare are quoted from the Complete Works, ed. Peter Alexander (London and Glasgow, 1951). Unattributed act, scene and line numbers are from Hamlet.

2. John Calvin, Calvin's Institutes, [trans. Henry Beveridge], (Florida, n.d.), I, xvi, 1.

3. Seneca, Moral Essays, trans. John W. Basore, 3 vols (Loeb edition, London and Cambridge, Mass., 1958), ‘De Providentia’, v. 7.

4. A. C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy (1960), p. 116. See also H. B. Charlton, Shakespearian Tragedy (Cambridge, 1949), pp. 103-4.

5. Shakespeare and Christian Doctrine (Princeton, 1963), p. 231. See also Ivor Morris, Shakespeare's God (1972), pp. 422-30.

6. Shakespearean Tragedy, its Art and its Christian Premises (Bloomington, 1969), p. 250. See also Lily B. Campbell, Shakespeare's Tragic Heroes (New York, 1966), pp. 141-7.

7. Seneca, his Tenne Tragedies, ed. Thomas Newton (1581), 2 vols (New York, 1967), I, 67.

8. Seneca, Ad Lucilium Epistulae Morales, trans. Richard M. Gunmere, 3 vols (Loeb edition, Cambridge, Mass. and London, 1961), XXIV, 25.

9. Ed. G. K. Hunter (1965, 1966).

10. Seneca, a Philosopher in Politics (Oxford, 1976), p. 177.

11. See Frye, Shakespeare and Christian Doctrine; William R. Elton, King Lear and the Gods (San Marino, 1968); Dominic Baker-Smith, ‘Religion and John Webster’ in Brian Morris, ed., John Webster (1970); Paul R. Sellin, ‘The Hidden God’ in The Darker Vision of the Renaissance, ed. Robert S. Kinsman (Berkeley and London, 1974); Robert G. Hunter, Shakespeare and the Mystery of the Gods (Georgia, 1976).

12. Luther and Erasmus: Free Will and Salvation, ed. E. Gordon Rupp and Philip S. Watson (1969), pp. 83-4.

13. Bertram Joseph, Conscience and the King (1953), p. 139; also pp. 136-41.

14. Lancelot Andrewes, Works, 11 vols (Oxford, 1854), V, 224, 234.

15. The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. Holbrook Jackson, 3 vols (1968), III, 385, 387.

16. The Plays of Christopher Marlowe, ed. Roma Gill (Oxford, 1971).