SOURCE: Shafer, Ronald G. “Hamlet: Christian or Humanist?” Studies in the Humanities 17, no. 1 (June 1990): 21-35.

[In the essay below, Shafer charts what he sees as Hamlet's temporary abandonment of Christian principles for the precepts of humanism—and his ultimate reversion to orthodox religious values. In his humanistic phase, the critic proposes, Hamlet is arrogant and egotistical, elevating his own volition above God's sovereignty, but after he acknowledges the righteousness of Christian morality, he humbly submits himself to God's will and becomes an agent of divine retribution.]

A good starting point for understanding the moral dimension of Shakespeare's Hamlet is with Irving Ribner's Patterns in Shakespearean Tragedy (1960). Ribner maintains that Shakespeare fashioned all of the elements of the play in such a way as to produce “the emotional equivalent of a Christian view of human life”; it is, thus, “an affirmation of a purposive cosmic order” (65). Hamlet's problem involves his denial of a “purposive and benevolent God” (66) and his failure to realize that “the punishment of the wicked” is God's “own prerogative” (67). To Ribner, the chief issue in the play is whether Hamlet will let “his Christian religion … guide him” (68) and become “a passive instrument in the hands of God” (69). To be victorious, Hamlet must do nothing but recognize that faith alone “frustrates” evil along with man's “cultivation of his own goodness” (72). Because Hamlet has not learned to believe in divine Providence, he is frustrated in his attempt to kill Claudius; he must recognize “the inability of man to execute the judgment of God” (77). Hamlet, at last attaining this moral insight, realizes “that heaven has preserved him,” faces death heroically, and submits to the will of God (80). Because he has completely yielded to his Sovereign Lord, he is finally able to destroy Claudius, “as a lawful act of public duty, that of a minister of God” (81). Hamlet at the end of the play is a “passive instrument in the hands of divine providence” (81). Thus, the play does not record man's defeat, but his “victory and salvation” (82) over the “mole of nature” which for Ribner is “original sin which beclouds man's reason” (83); “Without this struggle there can be no knowledge and no salvation” (88). For Ribner, however, the conflict is between original sin and submission to God's will and agency; I would characterize the conflict as being between two competing philosophies, Christianity and humanism.

To Shakespeare's contemporaries, the philosophy of humanism extolled human values and individual perception as truth. Man was deified because the philosophy enthroned his thinking over the law of God; in effect, it dethroned God as Sovereign of the universe. Such a philosophy seems to be the prevailing vision of Hamlet, and while humanistic thinking in the play is not confined to Hamlet himself, he does seem to embody its tenets. For instance, he believes that he is born to set right the Danish court—no talk here of “the Most High who ruleth in the kingdom of men and giveth it to whomsoever He will” (Daniel 4: 25); he rejects the notion that death is the vanquished foe which ushers in the new eternal state; he rejects God's moral law against suicide; he wishes to erase all commandments from his brain except the ghost's command to seek revenge. Hamlet would appear, in short, to be a first-order humanist, since for him personal thinking is the touchstone of truth and morality. A providentially-ordered world, in which God's will ought to prevail over man's temporal and capricious will, is a dimly recollected illusion.

Yet this view of Hamlet's humanism, which seems to yield in many ways a convincing and, to the modern mind, a satisfactory reading of the play is simplistic at best. An examination of biblical analogues in the play leads to an opposite view. Hamlet is at one point the humanist incarnate in the play, but is that philosophy characteristic of him? I will argue that Hamlet's humanism is a temporary flirtation which he resorts to during the trauma at the Danish court, that it disguises his strong affinity for orthodox and Christian values, that his dark night of the soul is caused by the influence of humanism and the rejection of his Christianity, and that he finally rejects this humanistic stance at the end of his life when he again reverts to traditional, Christian values.

This progression is worked out against a biblical backdrop which, always present though generally muted, offers a profound commentary upon the action of the play. Before charting this progression, however, we would do well to sample the play's rich biblical texture. Ophelia, for example, tells Polonius that Hamlet had buttressed his claims of love for her “With almost all the holy vows of heaven” (I. iii. 115), indicating a Hamlet steeped in traditional religious dogma: that is some young prince whose protestations of love are set in a religious framework! She tells Laertes not to show her “the steep and thorny way to heaven” (I. iii. 48)—certainly a biblical paraphrase of Christ's reference to the narrow way (Matthew 7: 14)—if he will not follow it himself. After the “To be” speech she invokes heaven twice to help Hamlet (III. ii. 135, 142), and during her madness her religious references intensify. As with most of Shakespeare's characters during fits of madness, the true terrain of her mind is then disclosed. Ophelia is no exception. In one song she laments that a maid fell from innocence, and in a later song (“And will 'a not come again”) she sings, “God 'a' mercy on his soul,” adding at the end of the song, “And of all Christians' souls, I pray God” (IV. v. 200-01). Ophelia's speech, in short, is laced with traditional, recognizable religious references.

Hamlet's use of biblical cognates is just as insistent. Upon seeing the ghost, he cries, “Angels and ministers of grace defend us!” (I. iv. 39). Past theological training serves him well and reminds him that the ghost may not be a ghost at all but a corporealized spirit being, possibly demonic. When he hears Rosencrantz say that the world has grown honest, he retorts, “then is doomsday near” (II. ii. 238). It takes no biblical scholar to refer to a religious event as commonplace as doomsday, but that he employs this eschatological term does offer a glimpse into his soul and an insight into his penchant for couching experience in religious terminology. It does, on the other hand, take a person with some in-depth familiarity with the Bible to call Polonius a Jephthah (II. ii. 411), an obscure biblical allusion found in the Book of Judges (Chapters 11 and 12). He counsels the players not to “out-herod Herod” (III. ii. 14), and he tells Ophelia that “virtue cannot so inoculate our old stock” (III. i. 118-19), a fairly obvious biblical throwback to the Pauline dialectic of the old and new man, which appears throughout the Pauline epistles. After the “To be” speech he entreats Ophelia to remember his sins in her prayers: “… in thy orisons / Be all my sins rememb'red” (III. i. 90-91). Would a person who really believed that man was the quintessence of dust in a godless world, where nothing was right or wrong except one's perception of it, have bothered?

Such biblical echoes are numerous in Hamlet's speeches, but they increase after the staging of Gonzago. During the speech Hamlet utters when Claudius is at prayer, he makes no fewer than four references to heaven. As he struggles to kill Claudius, his affinity for the moral law keeps appearing in the form of biblical phraseology. An interesting psychological truth is present here: Hamlet, drawing nearer to the destruction of Claudius, deliberately forsakes years of religious training and the moral law that had been the very basis of his life. As his conscious mind denounces that standard, his unconscious mind resorts to it all the more vehemently and feeds the conscious mind with biblical language. The two standards war in his mind. Such a classic irony: as he nears the fulfillment of his death plan, his spiritual nature asserts itself. Hamlet, oblivious to this war, registers only a profound depression because he has grieved the higher law of love.

Moments later in Gertrude's bedroom, he refers in quick succession to the cross (III. iv. 15), religion (l. 48), heaven (ll. 49, 60), judgment (l. 71), the devil (ll. 77, 169), virtue (l. 167), angel (l. 169), and grace (l. 151)—all stock in trade words from orthodox Christianity. He reminds us of a clergyman, armed with text, when he says to Gertrude, “Confess yourself to heaven, / Repent what's past, avoid what is to come” (III. iv. 156-57)—not a great deal different from John the Baptist or St. Paul preaching to wicked mankind. The anomaly is that this God-denying, Bible-rejecting, Claudius-destroying prince would admonish Gertrude with exclusively biblical precepts. Why is he so insistent that she align her life with such precepts when he is so far astray from them himself and when he denies their existence? Is he that hypocritical, or is the cry for her to repent actually a cry directed, albeit unknowingly, at his own soul? Is he holding up the mirror to Gertrude, or is the spirit part of Hamlet, his new man nature, holding up the mirror to the carnal part, his old man nature? I contend the latter as much as the former, which causes a radical change in Hamlet's behavior at the end of the play.

The biblical language continues into Act IV. When Hamlet talks with Claudius, he tells the king that Polonius is in heaven and that “man and wife is one flesh” (IV. iii. 56), an overt use of precise biblical wording. He refers to man's thinking as a “capability and god-like reason” (IV. iv. 38) which is not to go unused. Although his thinking is not “god-like” during his bout with humanism, he nevertheless realizes that man's reasoning is supposed to be sovereign, and he is enough of a renaissance biblical scholar to know that Satan kindles the carnal, unregenerated nature in man, just as God kindles the spiritually regenerated nature. In several different instances he inveighs against man's longing for greed and fame, the things of this temporal world, as when he says that Fortinbras' men will fight in Poland for an “eggshell” which is merely “tomb enough and continent / To hide the slain” (IV. iv. 64-65). The spirit part of him realizes that Alexander and Caesar are ashes used to stop a beer barrel (V. i. 207-14). These sound like the reflections of one preaching against the allurements of the carnal life which oppose the walk in the spirit. Though his conscious mind is tempted by the ghost to destroy, Hamlet cannot totally walk away from years of such spiritual indoctrination: in his mind he knows that the spiritual walk cannot be achieved in the energy of the flesh, but his actions are, for a time, inconsistent with that realization.

Of all Hamlet's speeches that resonate with a biblical tone, his instruction to Polonius on caring for the players is most remarkable:

God's bodkin, man, much better! Use every man after his desert, and who shall scape whipping? Use them after your own honor and dignity. The less they deserve, the more merit is in your bounty.

(II. ii. 529-32).

Here he instructs Polonius not to requite men in accord with what is due them, but in accord with his own personal sense of honor—that is, give more than they deserve, do unto them as you would have them do unto you, the Golden Rule again. Man is to be rewarded not for what he deserves or for what his performance merits but in a way that patterns God's love and grace.

The play is thus steeped in this religious thought and language, and that language extends to all characters, not just Ophelia and Hamlet. Polonius says anyone can “sugar o'er / The devil” (III. i. 48-9); the player queen speaks at length of fidelity in marriage (III. ii. 176-83); Claudius knows his offence is rank and smells to heaven (III. iii. 36); Gertrude knows she has violated Holy Writ by marrying her husband's brother: “Thou turn'st mine eyes into my very soul, / And there I see such black and grained spots / As will not leave their tinct” (III. iv. 90-93); when the grave diggers refer to Christian burial, the one in disbelief says to the other: “What, art a heathen? How dost thou understand the Scripture?” (V. i. 35-36).

Because Hamlet's soul, like the world of Denmark, is steeped in scriptural theology, the pertinent issue is what happens to Hamlet when he forsakes this teaching, when he abandons what Ophelia calls his “sovereign reason” (III. i. 160; my emphasis). The essence of Hamlet's thinking is its sovereign nature, a mind predicated on divine truth which provides him with an anchored base to withstand the raging vicissitudes of life, including the Danish court. When he disavows that theological standard, he is unmoored, indecisive, and disenchanted with life. Despite its attractiveness on the surface, a life grounded in his own standards overwhelms him, for it causes all action and thought to become arbitrary. A multiplicity of choices crushes him. Why act with determination when the next minute might reverse this decision? Harmony and equilibrium give way to a paralysis of the will. It is easier to drift than to decide, easier to revert to the carnal nature's ancestral voice of revenge than to assert the spirit nature's voice of love. The tides of mankind are toward the former, not the latter.

Having sampled the biblical analogues in the play, we are now able to note how the play carefully maps out Hamlet's transformation from a providentially governed standard to a humanistic one. Early in Act I, Marcellus comments that “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark” (I. iv. 89). Horatio immediately responds by standing on the belief he—and Hamlet too—has always known, “Heaven will direct it” (I. iv. 90), thereby invoking the old sovereign standard: anything amiss in the kingdom of men will be rectified by an ever-present God. Not so with Hamlet: seeing the ghost, he responds, “whiles memory still holds a seat / In this distracted globe,” he will “wipe away all trivial fond records, / All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past / That youth and observation copied there” (I. v. 97-102). Hamlet will eradicate all previous learning which, in a moment, he reduces to trivial and foolish records, even though they have steadied him through all the perilous shoals of his life to this point. In a telling line he says that “thy commandment all alone shall live / Within the book and volume of my brain, / Unmix'd with baser matter” (I. v. 103-05). He will permit the ghost's new commandment to hate and kill supersede God's commandment to love and forgive. And, hypocritically, he enjoins heaven's blessings upon this abandonment of heaven's plan: “Yes, by heaven” (I. v. 105). This manifestation of his self-idolatry again reveals the struggle in Hamlet's heart: as he disavows the old morality he continues to use its lexicon, as evidenced in the word “commandment.” Ages of spiritual osmosis cannot be shed in a moment of even herculean self-resolve. In this same speech he says he wishes to erase all recollections from “the table of my memory,” an interesting use of the table metaphor that recalls the Pauline letter to the Corinthians, when St. Paul says that the Spirit of the living God is written “not in tables of stone, but in fleshy tables of the heart” (II Cor. 3: 3). This is another illustration of the paradoxical Hamlet: he denounces the biblical ethic with biblical language. But equally important to our purpose here is to note the dramatic polarization of Horatio and Hamlet's responses: for Horatio, Heaven will direct anything amiss in the affairs of men, whereas Hamlet, by changing the commandment of the heart, will set it right himself without the assistance of Jehovah God.

The foregoing constitutes the first stage in his shift away from a sovereignly governed world. He fails to realize that God is in control, fashions his own vision of rectifying the state, and forsakes the command to love. His excessive lamentation over his father's death, which indicates an obdurate heart and failure to accept Heaven's will, reveals a deepening of the humanistic hold on his thinking. As is typical in Shakespeare's mature dramas, the person in the play one would least suspect, Claudius, articulates a profound truth when he speaks of Hamlet's “unmanly grief” and “a will most incorrect to Heaven” (I. ii. 94-95). Again, Hamlet is too enamored of his own heartbeat. His will that his father live predominates over God's will that he not live. That appears to be a subtle shift, but in point of fact it bespeaks a psychic change of the first magnitude: he has just crossed the great spiritual divide. Proof of that is his own admission, once he perceives reality solely from the viewpoint of a humanist standard, that the world is weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable. The longer this illusion exists, the greater the psychic damage it creates in Hamlet and those he poisons with it. Once he forsakes the notion of a world in which man has an ordered place, in which all works together for good, in which no problem is given man above what he is able to bear, in which no dilemma comes to man except that which God allows to filter through His own permissive will with the expressed intent of strengthening spirituality—once Hamlet forsakes that comforting ideology, he has no alternative but despair, and thus he contemplates his own death. Prior to his decision that self instead of God sat on the throne of his life, harmony existed. He was, as Ophelia tells us, “th' expectancy and rose of the fair state, / The glass of fashion and the mold of form, / Th' observ'd of all observers” (III. i. 155-57), living in a world where man, noble in reason, lived in a “goodly frame” (II. ii. 299, 305). Now his typically resilient optimism has been so effaced by humanism that he predicts future as well as present gloom: “it is not nor it cannot come to good” (I. ii. 158).

If the underpinnings of the play center on the dissolution of a religious morality in the heart of Hamlet, it comes as no surprise that Shakespeare spends some bit of time developing its opposite, the new creed of humanism. One of its obvious ideologues is Polonius who, in his parting words to Laertes (I. iii. 58-81), offers precepts that on the surface appear to be wholesome, even theological, but when perceived in the context of this thesis are age-old standbys of humanistic thought. Polonius instructs Laertes to be aware of his dress since appearance indicates the nature of the man inside. Is there any play when Shakespeare did not systematically attack that premise? He tells Laertes to avoid quarrels but when ensnared in one to manage it so as to win, another insight into his inverse of the Golden Rule. The quintessential humanist text of the play occurs at the end of this speech, “This above all: to thine own self be true.” In this speech, supposedly the clarion call to truth, lay the tragic root of Hamlet's demise, for his being true to self has actually caused him to be false to many; and once he begins the process of internalizing all reality and measuring it against the yardstick of self, he unwittingly loses himself in the labyrinthine jungle of self, an exemplar of the nation of Israel during the reign of the judges: “Every man did that which was right in his own eyes” (Judges 17: 6). Free from carrying the yoke of religious precept and bearing the bondage of servile responsibility to it, he learns in retrospect a profound paradox: that yoke had been real freedom, not enslavement, and the seeming freedom of living life by personal morality is incarceration.

Besides leading to perverse judgment, Polonius' advice occasions the play's supreme irony: the shallow thinking which Hamlet most acidly mocks is that of Polonius, yet it is Polonius' dictum, be true to self, that Hamlet, of all the characters in the play, follows most religiously. This irony has its equal: the self-centered action Hamlet rejects the most is Claudius' killing of Hamlet's father, yet in severing himself from the old Christian standard, which exists only in those who patiently wait on a sovereign God, Hamlet condemns himself to follow this same pattern of murder. Hating Polonius' babble, he nevertheless adheres to its command and becomes a babbler himself; hating Claudius' action of being a murderer, he nevertheless attempts to follow suit and becomes a murderer too. Polonius is the spokesman for the new creed of humanism, Claudius is a convert to it, and Hamlet, ironically, is the disciple who follows the lead of his mentors. Is this the utopia of freedom which he felt his severance from a Christian standard would create?

Certainly we would appear to be at the heart of one of the play's many philosophic messages. To live one's life at the center of God's will is to know certainty amid oceans of doubt—as Hamlet always did—while to step out of that will in a brazen assertion of self-will is to be pummeled by the billowing waves. Prior to his rejection of God's will, which occurs when he seeks his personal revenge (I. v. 32), Hamlet was the jewel of the nation, the paragon of sovereign reason. After his fall he becomes the curse of the nation with a reason “like sweet bells jangled” (III. i. 161). If the self is to be the new arbiter of morality and the old moral code is no longer operative, then man is left to rely on his reason alone, to devise his own system of right and wrong. If it is not God's standard, it has to be man's; there are only two options. When Hamlet says this, “for there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so” (II. ii. 249-50), he is not speaking in iambic pentameter—the line, that is, is not blocked off in poetry. In fact, all of Hamlet's speeches after his “O cursed spite, That ever I was born to set it right” (I. v. 189-90) appear in prose and not poetry, even though all other characters in these intervening scenes speak in poetry. How telling that Hamlet the poet speaks in prose, and how ironic that the linguistic alteration is the aftermath of his arrogant humanistic declaration. Is this accidental or the product of conscious artistry? I maintain that the loss of poetic eloquence mirrors Hamlet's psychic disarray. The life has gone out of the line, just as the soul has gone out of the man.

This change in language may be irrelevant to us, but we must note the Elizabethan attitude toward language. David Bevington is helpful on this point:

A key to understanding Shakespeare's language is to appreciate the attitude toward speech accepted by him and his contemporaries. Speech was traditionally and piously regarded as God's final and consummate gift to man. Speech was thus to Elizabethans a source of enormous power for good or ill. Truth, if truly uttered, was bound to prevail. To have heard truth and to have rejected it was an unnatural thing, a sign that Satan had entered the obdurate heart and had caused it to reject God's truth. Christians were bound to preach the Word, and to destroy that heretic who persisted in rejecting it. Hence the struggle to excel in eloquent utterance.

(Eastman 79)

Hamlet's continuing humanism causes him to regard events as the product of chance, “outrageous fortune” in his phrase; divine orchestration is not even considered. Death, the arch enemy, is from his point of view just as purposeless, “the undiscover'd country from whose bourn / No traveler returns (III. i. 80-81). This is Hamlet the humanist: wanting to die, rejecting God's will, quarreling with friends, seeing the world as cursed and chance-controlled, losing his poetic brilliance, perceiving himself as the harmony-restoring prince, delaying and mad.

He does not condemn himself to languish forever in this unhappy key. When his Christian values gain the ascendancy, he is able once again to gain control of his life. But the process is slow; it commences in the bedroom scene with Gertrude. He tells his mother that Heaven is, regarding her marriage to Claudius, “thought-sick at the act” (III. iv. 52) and that her sexual honeying is inappropriate. He is the moralist here who, as a result of being brought face to face with Gertrude's frailty, returns to his ante-humanist self. He is as Christian and moral in her presence as he had earlier been humanistic. The moral touchstone he uses to measure her spiritual ineptitudes condemns his own. Castigating her for the splinter in her eye forces him to an awareness of the log in his own. Gertrude knows Hamlet is turning her eyes into her soul, but she could never guess the extent to which he is turning his own eyes inward as well. The double standard finally reveals itself during this exchange. Granted, Gertrude's physical appetite may have clouded her judgment, but hers was no greater sin than Hamlet's contemplated murder of Claudius and his actual murders of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Perhaps there was room for Gertrude to assume a greater virtue, but her behavior was no worse than Hamlet's treatment of Ophelia during the staging of the play or, for that matter, than his treatment of his own mother.

The confrontation with Gertrude only partly explains his reversion to Christianity. The second appearance of the ghost is so shocking to Hamlet that it instinctively forces him back to his true self. Upon seeing the ghost, he blurts out a characteristic line: “Save me, and hover o'er me with your wings, / You heavenly guards!” (III. iv. 107-08). The line offers an insight into the true nature of Hamlet's soul: when confronted with real horror, he cries out to the angels to protect him, a ludicrous act, he indicated earlier, since angels are not a reality in a chance-controlled life. The appearance of the ghost strips Hamlet of his proud posturing of might and valor, rids him of his pompous talk of setting aright the realm, and discovers a scared young man whose reflexive response reveals an affinity for the God-ordered world, complete with ministering angels, which he, in an earlier egotistical moment, had forsworn.

Thus the dormant moral virtues in Hamlet's soul are awakened. The humanistic bent quickly demythologized, he fires at Gertrude a few volleys of biblical precepts. He says she ought “for love of grace” (III. iv. 151) to confess herself to heaven, to assume a virtue if she does not really possess it, and to refrain from illicit sexual union, when not much earlier he had spoken of fortune and absence of right or wrong, except as these exist in the mind. Hamlet, who previously indicated that morality exists internally in the human mind, not externally in the revealed and inspired Word of God, suddenly declares himself a spokesman for orthodox Christian values.

Hamlet's confrontation in the bedroom with his mother and the ghost enables him to see through the illusions that self-based wisdom has spawned. They are the watershed events that help him pulverize his own “puffed and libertine” humanistic illusions. Once their power is mitigated, he becomes a vessel capable of use by God, once again able to reactivate Christian values. In that humbled state, during which he is emptied of self, he is led to a revelation concerning the death of Polonius: “I do repent; but heaven hath pleas'd it so / To punish me with this, and this with me, / That I must be their scourge and minister” (III. iv. 180-82). Hamlet concludes that Heaven, not Hamlet, has orchestrated these events both to chastize the heady prince for his willful disobedience and to make him, in Bevington's gloss, the “agent of heavenly retribution.” It was, in short, Hamlet's intent to rid the kingdom of evil and set it straight in his way and in his time frame. That exalted humanistic intent has enabled him to accomplish little: instead of getting rid of Claudius, he merely delays and delays some more, experiences fractured relationships with Ophelia, Laertes, Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern, and directly or indirectly causes the deaths of Ophelia, Gertrude, Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern. But later, it “pleases” Heaven to use him as the “scourge” to purge the realm.

At the very moment Hamlet is disavowing belief in and boasting of his severance from God, God was holding Hamlet in His hand and tooling him to become the instrument to accomplish His will. Evil must be eradicated from the realm, and Hamlet will indeed be the agent to accomplish it, but only when he does it according to God's will and time frame, not his own. In perhaps the play's key line for supporting this thesis, Hamlet says, “There's a divinity that shapes our ends, / Rough-hew them how we will” (V. ii. 10-11). What a chasm between that statement and his earlier statement that he would shape events in the Danish kingdom toward order. This reference to a divinity-controlling universe is not the only evidence of Hamlet's radical return to Christianity. In regard to the presence of his dead father's seal on his person, which enabled him to prepare a new commission, Hamlet says, “even in that was heaven ordinant” (V. ii. 48). That is, God took care of even this minuscule detail, a point of view that totally contradicts his assessment of God during his humanistic phase, when he averred that one could only hope to dodge the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.

This reassertion of a governing divinity also causes Hamlet to think anew regarding the death of Claudius. Earlier it was “my revenge,” Hamlet's personal desire to destroy taking precedence over and acting independently of God's will. Now he says it is “perfect conscience” (V. ii. 67) to repay him, thereby signalling a radical shift in motive. Retaliation will not be the typical act of selfish revenge flowing out of a mind drunk with hate. If he is to destroy Claudius now, it will be the inevitable, God-sanctioned justice that flows out of a conscience made perfect by Hamlet's denial of his egotistical humanism and by his waiting on God.

Other actions at the end of the play further document this change in Hamlet. Whereas in his earlier self-assertive stage he jumped into the grave to fight Laertes—“But I am very sorry, good Horatio, / That to Laertes I forgot myself” (V. ii. 75-76)—now he is governed not by personal passion but by a Christ-like meekness. The desire for revenge is replaced here by the desire to forgive. He admits events had whipped him earlier into a “tow'ring passion” (V. ii. 80), but now before the duel he nobly confesses to Laertes, “Give me your pardon, sir. I have done you wrong” (V. ii. 224). This spirit of love for others makes him decidedly Christ-like, as does his reference to his heavy heart—“But thou wouldst not think how ill all's here about my heart” (V. ii. 210-11). A difficult line, it cannot be explicated with any certainty, but it is interesting to note the similarity to the statement made by Christ who, right before facing His cross and self-destruction, also referred to His heavy heart: “My soul is exceeding sorrowful, even unto death” (Matt. 26: 38). Both Christ and Hamlet die sacrificially, both purge evil from the social order by that death, both do not deserve death, both allude to a heavy heart, both are profoundly misunderstood, both seek personal will first—Christ had first requested His cup pass from Him before surrendering to God's will, just as Hamlet seeks his way first as well—and both attain a higher spirituality because of the adversity: certainly, Hamlet attains a higher spirituality because of his suffering, just as Christ was made perfect through suffering, as the writer of Hebrews explains: “For it became him [God] … to make the captain of their salvation [Jesus Christ] perfect through sufferings” (2: 10).

This array of religious references surrounding Hamlet clearly delineates his transformation. Immediately after he refers to his heavy heart, he says, “we defy augury” (V. ii. 217). Only belief in a shaping divinity will do for the regenerated Hamlet. Immediately thereafter, he says, “There is special providence in the fall of a sparrow” (V. ii. 217-18). Hamlet, even in his humanistic heyday, betrayed his soul's real first-love through language steeped in biblical antecedents, but by Act V it is not just vague biblical resonances but direct echoes of the language of Christ. The thought of God noting the fall of the sparrow hearkens back to Christ's statement in Matthew 10: 29, but the line is interesting for a second reason: it comes in the context of Hamlet and Horatio's discussion of Hamlet's duel with Laertes which Horatio says Hamlet will lose. Hamlet disagrees but concedes that even if he does, there is a “special providence in the fall of a sparrow,” thereby equating himself with a sparrow. That he calls himself a sparrow, a bird not held in high esteem by Elizabethans, suggests his emergent humility at the end of the play; he has come a long way from the proud prince who would singlehandedly set right the court and defy God in the process.

Building on the thought that a loving sovereign God cares for the destiny of a sparrow, Hamlet utters a line that more fully than any other in the play documents his about-face from his earlier humanism. In the “To be” speech he laments that death is the powerful foe that overshadows all human life and ultimately makes cowards of us all in our earthly enterprises. Now he says,

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. 218-20)

This is God's Hamlet. No childish whimpering about the injustice of God's having fixed His canon against self-slaughter, no perverse fear about the undiscovered country. Rather, we see a stoic acceptance that flows out of a heart prepared to face death. Rejecting death indicates an obdurate heart stubbornly pitched against God's will; accepting death reveals a heart mature in its spiritual walk, a heart that knows that the deceptive baubles of this world are gilded illusions that distract one from his quest for spiritual enlightenment: “The readiness is all” (V. ii. 22). The message of the play is that only the spiritually mature can see this while the rest of us have trouble acquiescing to the arch enemy at any time. For Hamlet the days of mental anguish are past; he is the compliant servant about to do the bidding of his Lord.

Characteristically, Shakespeare offers a figurative encapsulation of Hamlet's winning over humanistic darkness and progressing into the kingdom of light. Claudius promises Hamlet a pearl if he makes the first hit. That seems a fairly innocuous detail in the larger flow and sweep of Hamlet, but sensitized to the biblical backdrop we look again at the metamorphosis in Hamlet: he knows God sees sparrows fall and governs nations; he begs his mother to repent; he forgives Laertes and begs Laertes to forgive him; he confesses genuine love for Ophelia (V. i. 268); he inquires about Gertrude's well-being during the duel (V. ii. 311); he calls Laertes his “brother” (V. ii. 241), just as Christ had said those who do the will of the Father are his brothers (Mark 3: 35). At the end of the play, in short, he is living in the kingdom of God. Now we consider the pearl again. Hamlet will give all for that pearl, because attaining the pearl, which cannot be won if he does not duel, means certain death, owing to Claudius' chicanery. This closely parallels Christ's story of the pearl of great price: “Again, the kingdom of heaven is like unto a merchant man, seeking goodly pearls: who, when he found one pearl of great price, went and sold all that he had, and bought it” (Matt. 13: 45-46). The merchant gave all he had to obtain the pearl, just as Hamlet must give all, including his life. Hamlet wins the pearl because only he dies to self, dies to humanism, and sacrifices all. Hamlet's right view of God gives him a right view of fellow man: he loves man so much he will lay down his life for him. Only the unblemished sheep, the most perfect specimen, is used for sacrifice; only that man who makes it to the lofty summit of self-annihilation is consecrated enough to be used of God for this high calling. Hamlet has moved the whole way from total self-indulgence to total self-obliteration.

Proud Hamlet with all that intelligence and creative power at his beck, is powerless in his God-denying days to eradicate the vicious evil that rots the kingdom. Broken Hamlet, who has been sifted by untold adversity, much of which he causes himself, is the pliable clay that can be molded as the master potter wills. The same sun that hardens the clay melts the wax. In this reading of the play one of the central messages centers on the uselessness of the impetuous, those who rush precipitously into blind action, in contrast to those who wait on the great I Am, for this waiting activates Him in the affairs of men; and once activated it matters little how many backup plans Claudius devises—poisoned cup, poisoned dagger—God will see that good wins over evil. Claudius was a formidable opponent for Hamlet, but against a Hamlet backed by God he is a whirling speck of nothingness: “if thou shalt indeed … do all that I speak, then I [God] will be an enemy unto thine enemies, and an adversary unto thine adversaries” (Exodus 23: 22).

Just as the pearl in the cup has a rich metaphorical application, so does the cup itself. Gertrude drinks from the cup, and immediately after Hamlet says, “I dare not drink yet, madam; by and by” (V. ii. 296). A seemingly vacuous line, it too assumes monumental significance when given a biblical exegesis. Christ also made reference to drinking from the cup on two separate occasions—when He asked James and John, who wanted to sit on either side of Christ in Heaven, if they were “able to drink of the cup that I shall drink of” (Matthew 20: 22), and when He prayed to God in Gethsemane to “let this cup pass from me” (Matthew 26: 39). He wished not to drink from the cup but later did, a reference to His crucifixion. Hamlet also says he will drink from the cup but only when he too is ready, that is, after he has been killed sacrificially to cleanse the realm of evil. In his dying speech he says to Horatio, “Give me the cup” (V. ii. 345), another parallel to Christ.

Does Fortinbras' command that Hamlet be given a soldier's burial square with this reading? In a humanistic reading of the play, Hamlet's military burial proved he had become his war-like father; the warrior/soldier in him had triumphed over the artist/creator. But in the context of this interpretation we are obligated to ask which soldier it is—the Danish soldier of war or the Pauline soldier of the cross with the breastplate of righteousness and his loins girt about with truth? The heavy use of biblical analogues lends credence to the latter. Fortinbras says, “Bear Hamlet, like a soldier, to the stage” (V. ii. 398), much like St. Paul had told Timothy to “endure hardness, like a good soldier of the cross” (II Timothy 2: 3).

Earlier, mad Ophelia had said, “Lord, we know what we are, but know not what we may be” (IV. v. 43-44). This provides a statement of the theme of the play: Hamlet suffers self-delusion, thinking he knows himself well. By the end, his odyssey from self-indulgence to enlightenment teaches him to define himself and his life, not in terms of immediate circumstances that surround him, however overwhelming those might be, not in terms of where he has been or is currently, but in terms of what the special Providence Who shapes our ends can work out in his life and lead him toward in the future. His journey from Christianity to humanism and return is complete by the end of the play. No wonder his last words are, “The rest is silence” (V. ii. 360). He makes it back to Christianity; once one attains that degree of Christlikeness there is nothing to be said, not even in the face of death.

Works Cited

Eastman, Arthur M. A Short History of Shakespearean Criticism. Lanham, NY: University Press, 1985.

Ribner, Irving. Patterns in Shakespearean Tragedy. London: Methuen, 1960.

Shakespeare, William. The Complete Works of Shakespeare. Ed. David Bevington. Glenview, IL: Scott Foresman, 1980.