[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
self. It was a movement from the God-centered discourse of theology and confession to
56
the mancentered discourse of Freud and Jung. The usurpation of ecclesiastical by
temporal power only created a fresh need for the reallocation and redistribution of power.
Indeed, when Henry VIII argued that the bishop of Rome had himself usurped the
imperial power, the quarrel took on convolutions of virtually impossible complexity.
From Christopher Marlowe's Dr. Faustus to Dostoevski's Raskolnikov, the dilemma of
the impeachable self, the embryo for the alienated self, has colored art and life in ways
unthinkable prior to the Reformation. At stake has been nothing less than the power to
speak, define, and promulgate knowledge. The loss of the absolute truth leads first to
equivocation and then to anarchy. The Reformation disenfranchisement of established
truths, disruption of the mechanics of a civilization, subversion of normative values,
underwrote the apocalyptic visions of the times: Pascal's "The eternal silence of these
infinite spaces terrifies me"; Donne's "all coherence gone"; and of course Hamlet's "The
time is out of joint O cursed spite, / That ever I was born to set it right!" (1.5.188).
In ways perhaps forever lost to us, Hamlet seems to have been an artifact in the
intellectual ferment of its times, so much so, as the title page of the 1603 quarto edition
informs us, that it was especially played for the young men of Oxford and Cambridge
universities. Putting aside for the moment its manifest and frequently observed allusions
to Wittenberg, 3 that hotbed of Lutheranism, there is, for example, a way of allegorizing
the play as code for the Reformation itself. In such a model "that
-81-
adulterate, that incestuous beast," the uncle Claudius, stands for the usurping pope or
monarch (depending on one's theological orientation), who was tirelessly excoriated in
the polemical tracts as the very embodiment of the Antichrist. 4 Hamlet's ordeal rests not
only on fratricide and incest but on an outright violation of the feudal bond. The royal
bed of Denmark, that "couch for luxury and damned incest," adumbrates the larger
violation of Denmark in general. Elsinore has witnessed a quantum leap from the
tolerable but authoritarian juridicial model of contractoppression to the intolerable and
totalitarian arrangement of domination-oppression. 5 Claudius's politic manner may
conceal this fact from others at the court but not from the penetrating gaze of his nephew.
How ironic that Rosencrantz, of all people, should be allowed to utter the words "The
cess of majesty / Dies not alone" (3.3.15) when Hamlet himself should "cleave the
general car" with tales of his father's victimization.
The subversion of the Roman hegemony by northern states, or the subjugation of
northern nations by Rome, as the case may be, whether involving Luther, Calvin,
Servetus, Zwingli, Mclanchthon, or Henry VIII, released primordial energies as
dangerous to the macrocosm of Europe as to the microcosm of Elsinore. Throughout
northern Europe the new indifference to the legitimacy of traditional authority, the
willingness to embrace illegitimacy for a higher good, enmeshed nation after nation. And
efforts of usurper to legitimize the illegitimate increased in direct ratio to the blatancy of
the takeover. By comparison with the reformers, even a Henry Bolingbroke, a
Plantagenet by birth, had a greater claim to being one of "God's anointed deputies" on
57
earth. To return to Hamlet as allegory for this historical movement, Hamlet himself
becomes the people of England, torn between subservience to venerable and powerful
institutions and an emerging sense of self, and ever fearful, like Othello, that "Chaos
[may] come again" ( Oth. 3.3.92).
In these broad terms, then, one 'can allegorize Hamlet as a dark
-82-
conceit shadowing forth the Reformation. None of these hermeneutics would be in the
slightest compelling, however, were it not for a text and subtext-in the play itself that
hints again and again at sensitivity to, or even awareness of, the religious ferment of the
times. As a man of his own age, as well as all ages, Shakespeare could not easily have
shut out the continuing dialogue over religious matters. For now, however, I would like
to confine myself to three ways that Hamlet reflects the history of the Reformation
mentality: (1) the portrait of Prince Hamlet as a student dissident awash in the riptides of
Renaissance and Reformation discourse; (2) the testimony of the soliloquies to conflict
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]