The case for the First Quarto of Hamlet

by Harriet Murphy

Part II

Last month we began to examine the case for the Catholic content of the First Quarto of Hamlet, an early version of the play which is currently receiving attention, especially now that the ephemeral is en vogue. Performance – which is unrepeatable – is now a subject in its own right and ‘Performance Studies’ is the name of the new discipline in Universities which chronicles and comments on the various performances throughout history of standard texts, making good in the process the newish media of film, television and media which have captured those individual performances for us. In the case of the decision of Cambridge University Press to present to the general public the first versions of all of Shakespeare’s major plays we now have an opportunity, not just to compare and contrast texts at different stages, not just to reflect on the mystery of the ‘genesis’ of master-texts, but, in the case of the First Quarto of Hamlet:

to reflect more clearly on the unadulterated Catholic quality of this earliest version; to speculate that, as this quality dwindles in the later version, Shakespeare turned to protest more vehemently at the increased pressure brought to bear by tyrannical controls on the practice of the Faith itself in England over the time he was active as a writer until his death in 1616. And this by giving us a Hamlet whose holy hatred is both intense and frightening enough to force us to query what conditions, apart from innate sinfulness, are propelling it. Shakespeare as a dramatist becomes thus a historian of the descent into apostasy of the English nation.

1. Hamlet sees the Ghost of his father, who comes from Purgatory

The delayed appearance of the Ghost of Hamlet’s father introduces Catholic doctrine in an overt manner. In the Folio edition the Ghost appears at the very beginning of the play. The delay here has a different effect, coming after the brilliant exposure in the Polonius scene ("to thine own self be true") of the shifting sands of relativity in a purely secular world, because it increases the audience’s support for Hamlet’s vulnerability to the Ghost’s command to take revenge on his father’s murder. That the Ghost does this also complicates the appearance of Catholicity, since it is hardly coherent that a good ghost could also be encouraging a soul on earth to break one of the ten commandments, as Roy Battenhouse has always said. Hamlet is vulnerable and yet in a state of grace, inasmuch as he is immediately wary. Hamlet is unsure as to the spirit’s identity: "Angels and ministers of grace defend us!/Be thou a spirit of health or goblin damned,/ Bring with thee airs from heaven or blasts from hell,/Be thy intents wicked or charitable…" Horatio warns Hamlet that the spirits could be evil, deceiving him, taking advantage of his anguish and sadness, leading him to perdition. Memorably he warns Hamlet that they may deprive him of the "sovereignty of reason/And drive you into madness?" The Ghost then reveals that he is the spirit of his father, returning to earth from Purgatory, a "prison-house" where he suffers "Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature are purged and burnt away". This is orthodox and remains an affirmation of the Catholic, not the Protestant view, of a place between Heaven and Hell where souls must suffer pains similar to those of Hell until such time as all their sins are fully purged from their souls.


When the Ghost from Purgatory asks Hamlet to take revenge on his "foul and most unnatural murder", revealing that he was poisoned; that his wife had been seduced by the murderer "with gifts"; relating then the parable about the weakness of all virtue, and the power of mortal sin, lust ("But virtue; as it never will be moved,/Though lewdness court it in a shape of heaven,/So lust, though to a radiant angel linked,/ Would sate itself from a celestial bed/And prey on garbage"), the effect is twofold. On the one hand the graphic imagery has the effect of inspiring moral disgust at the depravity of sin; on the other Shakespeare surely encourages us to recognize the full attractions of revenge taken in the name of justice, the temptation to take the law into our own hands when moral and social anarchy has established itself. Now the Church has always taught that there is such a thing as a just war to defend Christendom, the crusades being the prototype, the war against the infidel. But what could Recusant Catholics in England reasonably expect from any attempt to defend themselves against persecution, when that persecution emanated from the monarch and was reinforced by her ministers? The Pope’s response to the plight of persecuted Catholics was straight-forward: they were to suffer as Our Lord had had to suffer in the face of hatred. And the Jesuits were briefed to spread this message amongst the population. The Ghost has a part to play in reinforcing orthodox Catholic doctrine in the hearts and souls of Catholics in Shakespeare’s audience on the one hand, but he also articulates a secret desire, the holy anger that must have lurked in the heart of any passionate pilgrim, the divine authorization to rebel, as opposed to the papal prohibition and exhortation spread by the Jesuit priests, to suffer in silence. As Fr. John Gerard S.J. noted in reference to the Gunpowder Plot, all Catholics were trying to do was to "deliver themselves from this fearful serfdom of soul and body".


Before leaving the stage the Ghost articulates another orthodox position. He acknowledges that he was murdered "in his sins", the fear of every true Catholic. He is an object lesson, then, in the need to remain prepared for death and in a state of sanctifying grace, lest the enemy catch us unawares and we die without confession, without being fortified by the last rites. All that Hamlet does is simply swear to remember him, and swear to keep the incident a secret. He does not make any commitment to execute the command to take revenge. He is convinced he is an "honest ghost" and goes off to pray, citing St. Patrick’s Purgatory, as if in recognition of the ancient site of Pilgrimage in Ireland where pilgrims still go to do penance for their sins; perhaps suggesting he wishes to go and do penance for his own sins or at least to answer the call of the holy soul from Purgatory, who has asked to be remembered. It is possible to remain resistant to this request, but this is a call to fellow-Christians from a holy soul in Purgatory that prayers and masses be offered up for the relief of souls in Purgatory.


At this point Horatio and Hamlet enter into a pact. They recognize the necessity of disguise, and to keep secret the Ghost’s existence. On the face of it this strategy is understandable to any audience, because we know they are privy to the truth about Hamlet’s uncle. That is the ‘natural’ explanation which will account for their subsequent antics. But the decision is also symbolic of the necessity of hiding those doctrines which had become controversial at the Reformation. Because Purgatory was thought to be a ‘Romish’ invention, anyone who would refer to it in public would be immediately betrayed. It had to be literally purged from public discourse. The pact of secrecy would have also been generally recognized as a necessary strategy for survival by any Catholic audience, who were used to projecting an illusion about their real identities which did not correspond to the real truth. They all had to evolve ways of evading deception, and to keep secret where they went for the sacraments, in particular. So cryptically this pact would have been understood by Catholic audiences as a necessity born of circumstance, to obscure the truth about who they are and what they felt, which was the intense desire to defend the Catholic faith and to save their souls by remaining loyal to Catholic truth. We should continue to give our ancestors credit for their heroism in persevering in the faith against all the odds.


The Protestant variant of adopting postures to survive at court for the purposes of temporal advantage, as elaborated by Corambis, is thus pitted against the Catholic variant of disguising one’s behaviour at large in the face of the holy war being waged against Catholics by their Protestant compatriots. "The time is out of joint. O cursed spite,/That ever I was born to set it right". The mysterious parting words imply that subliminally Hamlet has taken the decision to act against the generality of injustice.


2. Political life as a game of favours: Early signs of Masonry


This counterpoint carries on. Corambis in conversation with Montano is quite happy to send a spy to follow his son to Paris. Montano is to tell his son to "ply his learning", or apply the precepts he has taught him. Montano is allowed to follow Laertes anywhere, including a brothel. In this edition Ofelia, daughter of Corambis and sister of Laertes, receives explicit instructions from her brother on not yielding to the overtures of Hamlet. Corambis warns her too that love’s lines are keys which "unlock chastity". She immediately rebukes her brother for vaunting the value of chastity and virginity, when she knows he has no intention of following his own advice. Indeed she calls him a "libertine". Father and brother then are, in the eyes of the audience, hypocrites, and we are encouraged to view their overtures to Ofelia, not as an orthodox expression of Catholic virtue, but expedient ways of preventing Ofelia and Hamlet from marrying. Why? Because their own power base at court would be thereby undermined. Remember, the play makes clear Laertes and Corambis support the new king and enjoy an unspoken contract and considerable worldly advantage because they know, but refuse to divulge, the true facts about the murder. Ofelia can see through the hypocrisy in respect of virtue and she draws attention to their double-standards, but she is innocent of knowledge of their other machinations.


Corambis sends Montano to Paris, then, to pretend to affect a familiarity with all men, as a way of eliciting information. Information about what, we ask ourselves? Why does a father have to spy on his son? Another insight into the era of suspicion created by a court founded on self-love and ambition, that even fathers and sons conspire against one another. We should remember that the spy network set up by Queen Elizabeth was the distant ancestor of MI5 and MI6! Fuelled by one spirit only, fear of true Catholicism. So Recusant Catholics who had to live on their nerves - constantly aware of the necessity of distrusting all, even the most pious, for fear such men could be Elizabeth’s or James’ agents who could report them and thus cause them to be arrested, imprisoned, fined, or executed - would have recognized these signs. Shakespeare acknowledges this fear. And the hypocrisy of Corambis is exposed. Neither a benevolent father nor a true source of holy wisdom, he is merely an agent, part of a network of spies, and by extension a symbol of the real network at large outside theatres, where spies relentlessly sought out the names, aliases and whereabouts, hiding places and priests holes of practicing Catholics and their Jesuit priests. Corambis’ sycophantic attitude to the new King is also exposed: what else accounts for his flattery, his determination to assuage the King’s conscience if it is not because he knows? Having benefited materially from the change of King, he is merely anxious to repay the "debt" by using his own contacts to set traps for the unsuspecting? The idea of a network of spies who are all bound by an unspoken contract to help each other benefit from the world is the founding principle of Masonry. Here we have it in its earliest form.


Spying is an important part of court life in general, however. Corambis and the King spy on Hamlet throughout his soliloquy "to be or not to be" and Corambis spies on Hamlet as Gertred talks. These seemingly trivial attempts to make natural sense of Hamlet’s "madness" should be seen as a deeply ironic sign of solidarity with Catholic audiences, whose experience of being spied upon was neither funny nor trivial, but an aspect of that holy war waged by Protestants against the Catholic church, the purpose of which was to remove all traces of Her influence.


3. "To be or not to be"

Here we come to the first major example of a radical change of emphasis in this universally famous soliloquy. Because these changes are so significant in the First Quarto version, it is appropriate to reprint the soliloquy in full:

"To be, or not to be: ay, there’s the point.
To die, to sleep: is that all? Ay, all.
No to sleep, to dream: ay marry, there it goes.
For in that dream of death, when we awake,
And borne before an everlasting judge,
From whence no passenger ever returned,
The undiscovered country at whose sight
The happy smile and the accursed damned –
But for this, the joyful hope of this,
Who’d bear the scorns and flattery of the world,
Scorned by the right rich, the rich cursed of the poor,
The widow being oppressed, the orphan wronged,
The taste of hunger or a tyrant’s reign,
And thousand more calamities besides,
To grunt and sweat under this weary life.
When that he may his full quietus make
With a bare bodkin? Who would this endure,
But for a hope of something after death,
Which puzzles the brain and doth confound the sense,
Which makes us rather bear those evils we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Ay, that. O this conscience makes cowards of us all. –
Lady, in thy orisons be all my sins remembered."
I think it would be fair to say that from a purely literary point of view this is a more modest piece of writing. We have none of the memorable imagery of the opening "To be, or not to be, that is the question:/Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer/ The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,/ Or to take arms against a sea of troubles/ And by opposing end them". We could say that the First Quarto "to be or not to be" contains the seeds, from a literary point of view, of the tour de force of rhetoric that we all know.

What is more important, however, especially in terms of the claim that is being advanced that the First Quarto elaborates orthodox Catholic doctrine, is that in the above soliloquy Hamlet is not a modern atheist who does not know what happens after death - not one who is prevented from committing suicide only because, as an apologist for pre-Christian skepticism and stoicism, he is happier to continue to live as a personal preference and in the absence of any kind of evidence about the "undiscovered country" of life after death.

In this First Quarto soliloquy, Hamlet has faith in God, in Divine Providence, in a divinely ordered universe, and in the very idea of Divine Justice. It is his faith which prevents him from taking revenge on evidence of injustice on earth, of which there is plenty. It is his faith which saves him from despair, because he understands the value of suffering, and because he looks forward in faith, hope and charity and joy, to an eternity in Heaven! There is a "hope of something after death" (line 18). And it is this key inclusion which redirects the whole soliloquy, making Hamlet an apologist for the Four Last Things; for the personal judgment before a personal God; for the places known as Heaven and Hell where souls are destined for all eternity. The everlasting Judge is present from the beginning of the soliloquy; the undiscovered country is not some vague no man’s land, but a real place, "at whose sight/ the happy smile and the accursed damned". The only explicit reference to the cause of sufferings of Recusant Catholics in Shakespeare’s day is brief and is contained in line 13: the reign of tyrants vastly increases the extent of individual suffering. But we can endure suffering, it has a meaning because there is that hope of an eternal reward! Shakespeare is consoling his audiences! And the revolutionary impact of all of this on the overall meaning of the play comes with the final reference to the key word "conscience". In a weary sort of way, Hamlet has to accept that, in spite of the desire to settle scores ("that he may his full quietus make/With a bare bodkin.."), a greater and deeper knowledge makes us appear as cowards to the world and ourselves. That deeper and greater knowledge informs our conscience with the real truth, which is that, judged from the perspective of eternity, all suffering has an ultimate meaning, it is the preparation for the ultimate reward of Heaven to souls who wish to persevere, a Christian virtue.

In the soliloquy that we all know better, there is none of this. As we indicated last month, at best Hamlet considers the ‘virtue’ of endurance, for which there is no ultimate reward anyway, a perverse kind of ‘faith’. There Hamlet seemed to long for death, in the manner of a lurid, perverse Romantic hero. Harold Jenkins, editor of the Folio edition prepared for the Arden Shakespeare of 1982, Philip Edwards in 1985 and Kathleen O. Irace, editor of the First Quarto for Cambridge University Press in 1998, have next to nothing to say in their introductions about this complete and radical change in emphasis. The word Catholic does not appear, perhaps a sign of the ‘natural’ tendency to censor evidence of the Catholic world in history, culture and life, which is common for a very good reason amongst scholars and intellectuals.

In the lines quoted in full above Hamlet is not incoherent. He concludes in a way which shows he is at peace with his destiny, and the destiny of mankind. So he is in a state of sanctifying grace! In the later version Hamlet is not at peace, he is actively frustrated with his own destiny and that of mankind. He would actually rather like to execute justice (not necessarily divine justice, mind) and take revenge. He hates himself because he has not the force of mind, or the will-power, to do what he actually wants, and the only thing that is preventing him from acting is some vague reluctance to take risks that may involve loss of life, because as a proto-modern agnostic or atheist, he has absolutely no idea whether there is anything at all after death.

4. "Go to a nunnery, go": Hamlet rejects Ofelia

How can we account for the fact that, following such a sublime exposition of the Four Last Things, Hamlet is counseling Ofelia to abandon the world altogether and retire to a convent? Hamlet appears to have been propelled by the evil spirits to doubt the integrity of truth and beauty as they appear to be embodied in Ophelia, the young woman Hamlet has loved, and who has in no way been tainted by the machinations of Hamlet’s uncle and his henchmen. Perhaps Shakespeare is encouraging us to meditate on the consequences of evil, inasmuch as Hamlet now punishes Ophelia for the evils of womankind he has had to experience in his mother, whose virtue had degenerated into vice in the face of temptation. Again we return to a subliminal meditation of the play, the severe effect of evil on our capacity to persevere in the three theological virtues of faith, hope and charity. We all know that the visible example, the Word made flesh, inspires us to overcome our frail natures and persevere in virtue. By the same token every public departure from the path of virtue weakens the community as a whole, as here. Hamlet is close, not only to producing a universal hatred of woman, but a universal hatred of mankind. The all pervasive sense of sin causes him to wish to preserve all of womankind from the temptations to sin provided by men, and all men from the temptations to sin provided by women. Sex and sin are linked in such a way as to legitimize a new imperative, to make the human race extinct by abandoning the sacrament of marriage. This view is Gnostic and has always been regarded as heretical by the Church.


5. Hamlet’s diatribe against fishmongers

Hamlet condemns Corambis. He is dismissed scornfully as a fishmonger. He then mocks other of the King’s henchmen, Rossencraft and Gilderstone (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern of the later version). He tells them, ironically of course, that his own strange antics have been brought about by his desire for "preferment". He is simply sickened by the shifting sands of loyalty, and the driving force of human ambition he sees in the new King’s courtiers: "..those that would make mops and mows at my uncle when my father lived now give a hundred, two hundred pounds for his picture".

The playwright Tom Stoppard made universally known one of the last lines of the later Folio edition not included in the First Quarto, namely "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead". In that later edition the lines come in the last scene of the play after the deaths of Hamlet, Gertrude, Laertes and the King, and before Horatio (who here alone merely expresses the wish that a man who has died saying "the rest is silence" may be sung to rest by the angels) announces that Hamlet will be given full military honours as befits a soldier. Given the few but significant references to things German in the play it will be of interest that Rosenkranz is the German word for rosary and Guildenstern a possible old form of the words for golden star. Is it possible that Shakespeare wished to insinuate a formal, emphatic verdict on the growing spiritual and moral bankruptcy of England in the later version by suggesting that the ubiquity of evil was linked to the other symbolic victory of the Reformation, that war on Our Blessed Lady which had led to her removal from public life? The vitriolic attacks on Our Blessed Lady in words had lead to the destruction of so many of her shrines, the renewal of the iconoclasm, and, over time, under Cromwell to a very foul war on the rosary itself, since it was later banned and made illegal. The litany of Loreto of 1570 identified Our Blessed Lady with the star of the sea (‘Stella Maris’). Perhaps in this rather un-Marian play, Shakespeare was nonetheless able to insinuate a cryptic message about the underlying truth concerning the wars of Religion in the Dowry of Mary, by stating categorically that the cause of all evil is the abandonment of Our Lady. After all, this is her position at the beginning in the Book of Genesis – depicted with her foot on the head of Satan – and at the end, from chapter 12 onwards in the Book of the Apocalypse. She is also the ultimate direction of all salvation history, as we know from Our Lady of Fatima’s promise: "In the end, my Immaculate Heart will triumph". Which is why such a statement is particularly meaningful as a parting thought in a play of this magnitude. The last two dogmas of Our Lady, Mediatrix of all Graces, and Our Lady, Co-Redemptrix have yet to be proclaimed, but will be proclaimed when the Church and the people know, understand and believe that to abandon Our Lady is the fastest way to apostasy; the surest route to damnation and the easiest way of destroying the fabric of all societies, large and small.

6. "Why what a dunghill idiot slave am I?..
The play’s the thing/wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king"

In the First Quarto soliloquy in which Hamlet admits to seeing himself as an abject soul, a dunghill idiot and slave, he also decides to provoke repentance in his uncle’s soul resulting in a formal or informal confession before God of his mortal sins. Hamlet decides to use the strolling players to reenact the original murder scene to see whether what the Ghost says is true and if it was thus a true emissary of Divine Justice, and to provoke a soul in a state of mortal sin to repent by appealing to his "conscience", a word often used in the play, always identified as the grace in the soul acting to protect the soul from heresy. It reinforces Catholic doctrine and the power of the sacraments to wash away all sin. Indeed, the play within a play has precisely this effect, as we shall see. But before his uncle makes a confession Hamlet once again indulges in a full-scale denouncement of the King’s courtiers, Rossencraft and Gilderstone. They are memorably likened to a sponge "that soaks up the king’s countenance, favours, and rewards". The King is also at fault: "..he doth keep you as an ape doth nuts in the corner of his jaw, first mouths you, then swallows you. So when he hath need of you, ‘tis but squeezing of you, and sponge, you shall be dry again, you shall". This graphic imagery strengthens the audience’s hostility to all evil and moral depravity, and as such it is in the service of Catholic doctrine.

The strategy to provoke repentance in his uncle brings the players on stage. Hamlet finds they imitate humanity abominably. And there is much facetious punning about the illustrious function of art, which was always supposed to either imitate or represent nature and to entertain, instruct and ennoble audiences. The shallowness of professional acting reminds us, by default, of the real temporal imperative, of "imitating Christ", and the great medieval spiritual work on that very topic by Thomas à Kempis. That mere diversion and entertainment can also obscure the terrible truth about our sinful souls is an insight which would not have been lost on an audience versed in the reality of the Apocalypse and Doomsday, the ultimate End of life on earth, with which the medieval world was more familiar in a real sense, than we. Indeed in the course of their playing Hamlet exclaims "Wormwood!", a direct quotation from the Book of the Apocalypse, chapter eight, in which another fallen star proves the end of everything. In the play within the play the mysterious exclamation is provoked by scenes of murder, incest, and adultery. Shakespeare’s audience would have recognized that the crisis at the apex of society literally sounded the end of the world for the Catholic faith. In recognition of the power of theatre of the more sacred kind to influence hearts and souls, Queen Elizabeth I requested that references to religion be purged from theatrical discourse. The goal of censuring truth was of course further advanced when the Puritans secured the closure of the theatres in toto later on in the century.



7. The King’s confession, a temporary respite from the tyranny of mortal sin

As in the later edition the usurper King does repent as a direct result of the reenactment of a murder scene by the strolling players, and the soliloquy is a perfect example of a perfect act of contrition, outside the confessional yet valid, in the Church’s eyes, before God. Echoing Holy Scripture the usurper King believes that his crimes of murder and adultery can be forgiven and that his soul can be washed "white as snow". Then he goes on: "Ay, but still to persever in a sin,/It is an act ‘gainst the universal power./Most wretched man, stoop, bend thee to thy prayer,/Ask grace of heaven to keep thee from despair." His request for supernatural help is granted and he kneels. Perversely the hidden Hamlet knows and understands from the point of view of eternity how a contrite heart is pleasing to God, so he does not exploit the opportunity to murder him because his Uncle would die in a state of grace and eventually go to Heaven. So Hamlet too has fallen from a state of grace, of sublime faith in the ways of Divine Providence, and, reminiscent of an evil spirit, only refrains from murdering his uncle because he prefers to be an agent of damnation, not salvation. Hamlet the vengeful spirit intends quite vindictively now to delay the murder and to wait to catch him unawares, "at some act/That hath no relish of salvation in’t,/Then trip him that his heels may kick at heaven/ And fall as low as hell". Meanwhile his uncle has knelt in the knowledge that: "No king on earth is safe, if God’s his foe". As if casually, Hamlet thereafter kills Corambis by mistake, thinking he is a rat (which he is, as it were) and with no regrets. Are we to deduce from this how easy it is, possessed by the evil spirits of anger, vengeance and passion, to lose a state of sanctifying grace? I think so.


8. Hamlet converts his mother Gertred, who repents of her sin of adultery

Another very significant difference between the two versions is the way in which Gertrude in this edition is sympathetic, and contrite in the face of her own mortal sins. Hamlet has not indulged his uncle, but will indulge his mother. Indeed this is the request of the Ghost at the outset: "..let not thy heart conspire/Against thy mother aught; leave her to heaven/And to the burden that her conscience bears". The beauty of mercy and compassion and repentance are greater here, and especially in a small speech which is not repeated in the major edition, in which Hamlet prays for the grace to rebuke his mother in a way pleasing to God and which will encourage her to repent: "O God, let ne’er the heart of Nero enter/This soft bosom./ Let me be cruel, not unnatural./I will speak daggers; those sharp words being spent,/To do her wrong my soul shall ne’er consent". Now these words replace the later edition’s explicit confusing of the two separate issues of the punishment due to the usurper King and the encouragement to repentance offered to Hamlet’s mother. There Hamlet meditates upon the prospect of murdering the King, and enlists his mother’s support in his bid to murder him, but he seems carelessly indifferent to his mother’s state of soul. His words there: "I must be cruel only to be kind", have followed on from the gross and morally repugnant idea of his being both a "scourge and minister". They do not refer to a way of stimulating repentance in his mother at all.

In the Quarto edition Hamlet is instrumental in bringing his mother to repentance, which effectively reverses what happens in the later edition, where he almost hates her, shows her no mercy and in his impatience sees her primarily as a symbol of the promiscuity of all things now that Satan seems to be the driving force behind all action. The last major appearance of the Ghost in the Folio edition coincides with Hamlet’s interview with Gertred and keeps alive, by contrast, the prospect of grace and repentance: "Speak to her Hamlet, for her sex is weak./Comfort thy mother, Hamlet, think on me". The path to repentance begins with penance, and Gertred promises to repel her husband’s advances, following Hamlet’s advice: "Hamlet, I vow by that majesty/That knows our thoughts and looks into our hearts,/I will conceal, consent, and do my best, what stratagem soe’er thou shalt devise". She is part of the plot to trap the King and to get him murdered in both editions, but our First Quarto displays greater evidence of the workings of supernatural grace. The counterpoint between Gertred and her husband as penitents then continues, so that, whilst Gertred begins her penance, her husband, whilst he has confessed, is not given the grace to sustain a state of contrition in his soul. A few scenes later he is plotting to murder Hamlet. The tyranny of evil coexists with the order of grace, as we are taught. Hamlet’s uncle hates Hamlet, and this un-Christian hatred of one’s enemies is then echoed in Laertes’ violent impulse to murder Hamlet, once he learns he is responsible for his father’s death and his distracted sister Ofelia. The King exploits this situation to his own advantage. He now plans to use Laertes to execute Hamlet, so his crown and state may be "free". This was how Queen Elizabeth I felt as she sealed the execution warrant for Mary, Queen of Scots, and the barbarism would not have been lost on those in the audience who objected to the murder of a divinely anointed Catholic queen, who had also been the rallying-point of Catholic resistance.

In the death and burial of Ofelia the First Quarto raises the question of suicide for the first time. Again the text reverses what happens in the better known version. There we are told that Ophelia did commit suicide and was deprived of a Christian burial. The First Quarto does not close the issue of suicide, and also introduces a new ‘spin’. We learn that Ofelia is to be given a Christian burial only because she is well-born. Those in position of influence and power are able to exert pressure on the Church to "adapt" standards to suit their needs: the Church no longer serves God, but, slave-like, panders to the whims of the people, a not so sly back-hander directed at the new Church of England and its sycophantic submission to the monarch and his/her whims. The meditation on death involved in the scene with the skull of Yorick merely echo the general sentiments of Ash Wednesday "ashes to ashes, dust to dust".

The conclusion of the whole play is altogether more muted: Hamlet regrets that he momentarily lost control of his temper with Laertes, and has compassion for a man who has lost a father and a sister and asks for peace before the rapier scene in which he dies, but not before there is true Christian forgiveness: "I do forgive thee/ And I thee", a more simple version of the later text. Hamlet’s last words after this are "Heaven receive my soul". These are not Hamlet’s last words in the later edition, where he gives his blessing on Fortinbras before announcing "the rest is silence", which conviction affirms the agnostic tendency we identified in the "to be, or not to be" speech.

CONCLUSION

In a medieval morality or mystery play the symbolic triumph of good over evil reinforces the idea of a divinely ordered universe. We know that Shakespeare was familiar with the various cycles which reenacted all the liturgical feasts of the Church and recounted the most well-known stories from the Bible, from the Fall of Man to the End of the World, to supposedly "illiterate" audiences: to spectators of the public performances of those medieval guilds of actors in pre-Reformation Europe which dealt exclusively with sacred subjects - from Genesis to the Apocalypse, from the beginning of life on earth to the end of life on earth - and performed them in all the major cities. Shakespeare was familiar with the Coventry cycle. In our examination of Hamlet we cannot go quite this far and say that the First Quarto is a medieval morality or mystery play, for the simple reason that the effects of the Reformation are everywhere in evidence. We have been able to show that the cycle of birth and death – both physical and spiritual – continues as it would in a medieval morality or mystery play. But the cycle is under pressure from and vulnerable to a new culture of negotiation, as represented by all the proponents of the new world order, the ‘new’ courtiers supporting usurper monarchs, with their networks of organized persecution and oppression. Hamlet is caught, but he does not succumb, although he is tempted, as many Catholics in Recusant England undoubtedly were. In human terms his poses and aggression and holy hatred are certainly understandable. However there is little evidence of Satanic influence, indeed, Hamlet positively helps to redeem those who can be redeemed, like his mother, Gertred and the representative of untainted, virginal purity, the beautiful young Ophelia. He prevents Horatio from committing suicide (which does not happen in the later edition) and is reconciled to Laertes in true Christian forgiveness. Set against this, he does not forgive his uncle, and momentarily appears triumphant as he delights in the very prospect of catching a man in his sins, which is hardly a sign of grace. He also remains determined to revenge his father’s death, which dream he is prevented from realizing only because circumstances get the better of him. But everywhere the fight to sustain the faith is compromised by the organized forces of evil.

The most powerful argument in favour of the centrality of the Catholic faith in the First Quarto relates to the soliloquy "to be, or not to be". This is symbolically placed at the centre of the play, and unambiguously articulates the real reasons for persevering in the Faith, no matter what the odds: "the joyful hope of this,..a hope of something after death". As Christ suffered on the cross to save us from our sins, so must modern man suffer, even when the very fabric of moral, social and political life has been so stained by the sin of heresy. In the medieval world suffering had a purpose. So too in the modern world, although with a marked difference. Individual souls will continue to yearn for the beatific vision, and the promise of a just reward from "an everlasting judge", but the faith is now within the soul more so than ever because the unity of the Church and the mystical body of Christ is being actively destroyed by internal schism and heresy. The value of the First Quarto of Hamlet is that it reinforces the conviction that the divine order is still underpinning what looks like an irredeemably compromised universe in precisely those souls already touched by the grace of God. Whereas we have seen that the Folio edition was a meditation on the mystery of iniquity with few signs of the mystery of grace, we can say that the First Quarto is not only a work of consolation in times of persecution but a meditation on the mystery of grace and the mystery of iniquity, in a near perfect way.

The time is probably now ripe to reexamine all the First Quartos of the great plays to see whether Shakespeare reworked each of his plays in the light of historical changes which he both witnessed and for which he suffered. As the years went by in the course of his own writing career the situation of Catholics did not improve, it degenerated, Mary Queen of Scots’ son James I being a particularly grave disappointment to Catholics. Shakespeare recognized that here was no passing heresy, but one which was so well organized as to be capable of sustaining a permanent revolution. Until we carefully reexamine the changes made between each First Quarto and the subsequent established master-text in the light of the extraordinary tensions associated with the Reformation we will continue to misunderstand the immense profundity of this great historian-dramatist. Perhaps the simple point about the radical differences between the little known First Quartos and the universally known Folio editions - as we have shown here in relation to Hamlet - is that Shakespeare wished to chronicle the temptation to apostasy as the strength of the Faith weakened under political and other pressures. Until this work to reclaim Shakespeare for the truth about the shift towards deregulated secularism in English history is done, usurper critics will continue to use the bard to legitimize virtually every single ideology known to our modern, atheist world. We should not forget that William Shakespeare was born and died on the Feast of St. George for a very good reason. He was a true patriot who, in an era of censorship, when the public life of the Church was proscribed, used his God-given talents in the public sphere, in the daily life of the theatre, to show mercy to suffering souls, and to console them as they were being persecuted for the simple crime of remaining faithful to the Church founded by Our Blessed Lord.

Our Lady of Fatima, pray for the conversion of England.

The case for the First Quarto of Hamlet

by Harriet Murphy

Part I

The popular and academic world continues to reflect on Shakespeare’s support of Recusant Catholic England, and so far this has done nothing to damage the near universal agreement that he is one of the greatest writers of all time, if not the greatest writer of all time. The purely biographical proof of Shakespeare’s familiarity with Recusant life is now quite well established. He was active as a tutor to a well-known Recusant Catholic family and a supporter of the banished old rite mass, dying a "papist". He knew and loved the Jesuits, particularly St. Robert Southwell, the poet. As a Catholic his heart must have been broken by the failure of the Babington Plot, the Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, the failure of the Spanish Armada, the Essex Rebellion and the Gunpowder Plot, all of which lead to an intensification of militant anti-Catholic propaganda and seriously weakened any confidence in the hope of a restoration. The punishments, arrests, imprisonments, executions, fines and general fear and misery in the daily life of ordinary Catholics meant that morale was low, especially under King James I and his Government, who were a great disappointment, as intent on a systematic campaign to extinguish the Faith in the "dowry of Mary" as Queen Elizabeth I. The virulent propaganda was directed at lay Catholics in general but also the Jesuits in particular, who had of course been instrumental in keeping the Faith alive, and had lost about twenty-three of their men as martyrs for the Faith at Tyburn, starting with St. Edmund Campion. In a contemporary historian’s account of the Jesuit presence in Elizabethan and Jacobean England, Shakespeare is explicitly identified as the ally, the "papist friend" of the Jesuit Fr. Robert Persons: "the one ever feigning, and the other ever falsifying the truth". That Shakespeare was in league with the Jesuits, spiritually if not physically, should make us receptive to the possibility that his plays have more than just an incidentally Catholic component.

A counter-cultural movement has always made its own, seemingly idiosyncratic contribution to the question of the greatness of Shakespeare, by claiming that the works published under the name of Shakespeare were actually written by Francis Bacon, or the Earl of Oxford, or Queen Elizabeth I, or Christopher Marlowe, most of whom were patently hostile to the ‘old faith’. How can the biographically Catholic Shakespeare coexist with an imposter Shakespeare, apologist for Protestant Reform and the Ascendancy? At first sight it does not seem uncharitable to want to dismiss this speculation as nonsense, unless the claim is being made that the Catholic Shakespeare’s works were edited by anti-Catholics to purge them of the ‘old faith’ and thus help to keep England confirmed in the new? An interesting conspiracy theory, perhaps.

Resume of Research

More recent research, however, encourages us to consider that there has been a different conspiracy at work – although not one which would suggest that Shakespeare the author is a fictional illusion or the creation of anti-Catholic editors. Brian Vickers in Appropriating Shakespeare (1993) shows that virtually every ideology known to man has sought to find its legitimation in works by Shakespeare, who has thus been appropriated for each specific cause, humanism, feminism, Marxism, psycho-analysis, gay studies, performance studies, and so on. Astonishingly, given the current vogue for placing literary works in their ‘real’ historical context, many critics seem allergic or impervious to the strength of denominational politics during the period in which Shakespeare lived and wrote. Two prestigious editions of Hamlet in current usage edited by Philip Edwards and Harold Jenkins make virtually nothing of the Catholic-Protestant tensions in their extensive footnotes and scholarly introductions. In this very broad sense we can say that history has "successfully" - as far as the public sphere is concerned – censored Shakespeare. Given the fact that militant anti-Catholic hatred intensified under Elizabeth I and James I and that it has permeated the largely Protestant historiography of this country, we can take for granted that only Catholic critics will be more likely to be receptive to any profoundly Catholic meaning in the works. A lot is at stake, after all.

The attempt so far to link William Shakespeare’s works with orthodox Catholic doctrine in the twentieth century has been very modest, but this is changing rapidly, perhaps because so many Catholics today who defend the traditional Faith to which the bard was devoted, are currently experiencing exactly the same kind of agony felt by Recusant Catholics in Elizabethan England as they try to save the old rite of Mass and preserve the integrity of Catholic doctrine and practice, against considerable odds. On the positive side, in 1846 John Henry de Groot published an account of the Shakespeares and the old faith, followed in the early twentieth century by the works of Clara Longworth, Comtesse de Chambrun, and in 1952 by Mutschmann and Wentersdorf on Shakespeare and Catholicism. Other Catholic scholars are Roy Battenhouse and Peter Milward SJ. The latter’s recent The Catholicism of Shakespeare’s Plays (1997) and Shakespeare’s Apocalypse (2000) are now available in paperback from The Saint Austin Press. Many of these Catholic critics make the Catholic content of the plays absolutely central in quite a simple way, whilst the majority of non-Catholic critics typically tend to ride slip-shod over all the Catholic allusions. Anyone interested in reading an excellent account of all of this, together with a brief review of all the references to Holy Scripture, to Catholic doctrine, to the liturgy, to the sacraments, to the ten commandments, to the seven deadly sins, and to the role of priests in saving souls in Shakespeare’s work should read Ian Wilson’s Shakespeare: The Evidence (1993). Professor Allen White has produced a series of tapes on Shakespeare’s work and the question of his Catholicism, which are available from the Society of St. Pius X seminary in Winona in America. On Good Friday this year the Times Literary Supplement published an essay by Clare Asquith about Shakespeare’s mysterious poem ‘The Phoenix and the Turtle’, showing that it meditates on the Catholic doctrine of the Mass and the Priesthood. Finally, the much discussed sympathetic portrayal of pre-Reformation England from a Catholic point of view, Eamon Duffy’s Stripping the Altars (1992), is vital in this new debate and all who have not yet read this should do so.

We will attempt to illustrate that Shakespeare wrote with the intention of consoling Recusant Catholics in their distress at a time when they were being persecuted for their beliefs. Given that the power of censorship in his day was great, and that the Government’s agencies were waging a war against Jesuits and all practicing Catholics, Shakespeare had to address his audiences in ways which acknowledged the range of denominational factions amongst spectators. He had to produce a successful illusion that he was not subverting the political status quo; was not an outright critic of the sovereign; did not intend to cast aspersions on the legitimacy or not of reigning monarchs; and yet evolve a secret language of signs, signals, symbols and associations, probably not fully meaningful to non-Catholics, cryptic references to the contemporary, and the struggles of Catholics under a reign of terror, which would be well received and understood in silence by those who were having to adapt to the strategy of subterfuge and silence in order to preserve the Faith. Virtually none of Shakespeare’s plays is set in contemporary England. He repeatedly chose places and settings either far distant from England or at periods in history far removed from immediate post-Reformation England, in order to make it seem that his work was not relevant to his present day.


THE MASTER-TEXT

Three editions of the play Hamlet exist, a play universally regarded as great although often referred to as a "problem play", on account of its grand and bewitching incoherence and the near universal chaos and violence. Revenge tragedies were commonplace in the period – doubtless because the spirit of revenge in social and political life was very powerful – although Hamlet has always been considered a critical commentary on the conventions of the genre. It never goes so far as to advocate revenge unconditionally.

One edition we will call the master-text, known as the Folio edition or Q2. This is the edition in popular use at schools and universities, and one with which we are all familiar. It was first published in 1604-5, an interesting date, given the drama of the Gunpowder Plot. It was performed to Jacobean audiences, and to James I at Hampton Court. This Hamlet appeals broadly to a modern, atheist sensibility because the figure Hamlet is a rebel; he is prepared to overthrow the moral order; he suffers; he cannot understand the meaning of life; is passionate in everything he does; he longs for faith but suffers from doubt and nihilism; produces a coherent apology for skepticism and stoicism; hates and loves both his mother and the beloved Ophelia; is capable of destroying life without feeling much remorse (Polonius), and depriving souls of eternal salvation (his uncle); and whose residual Catholic faith is permanently at war with a savage, amoral, vindictive barbarism.

For instance, in the standard edition Hamlet positively considers suicide, at one time considered a virtue in a man in pre-Christian thought: "O that this too too sullied flesh would melt,/That and resolve itself into a dew,/Or that the Everlasting had not fix’d/His canon ‘gainst self-slaughter". He is restrained in his desire to overthrow the moral order by his respect for the sixth commandment, which he nonetheless regrets, so he has become slightly estranged from the laws of God. Knowledge of his attraction to suicide colours the way we then interpret the "To be, or not to be" soliloquy: one of Hamlet’s options is to end his own life, because it seems so worthless. Peter Milward suggests that the idea of taking up "arms against a sea of troubles/ And by opposing end them" relates to the dilemma of all Recusant Catholics, who must have reflected on the recourse to arms to end their woes. However, the argument of the rest of this soliloquy is actually incoherent. Hamlet talks of an "undiscovered country", a land from which no traveller returns after he has cast off his "mortal coil", by which he means some anonymous place that one might visit after death: importantly this place has no name, and it is thus certainly not either Heaven or Hell. Because there is no evidence of what the undiscovered country is like, Hamlet argues it is better to stay with the evils and injustice of the world, rather than flee them, which would be to take a risk, given the unknowability of ultimate truth. He then recommends the ‘virtue’ of endurance, in the face of all the injustices of the temporal world. This manly, secular, agnostic ‘virtue’ has no transcendental value, does not promise to provide relief or comfort in the face of tribulation, and it thus links Hamlet with pre-Christian stoicism and scepticism. There are no traces of any kind of Christian faith in the meaning of life or life after death.

At the heart of the play, then, we have a man who admits that there is nothing. It is all of a piece that the very last scene of the play, when the stage is littered with corpses, is saturated with references to Roman scepticism and stoicism. Horatio takes his own life, and Hamlet seems to recognize the virtue of this. His last words are "the rest is silence" suggesting the cosmos is a kind of empty void in which human voices are not heard. This is the modernity, that the universe of the play is close to meaningless because the moral order provided by the medieval Catholic world view is no longer fixed by faith in God, in creation, in the Incarnation, the Resurrection and the Redemption: the fact that some of the text echoes the liturgy of a requiem, that there are countless quotations from Holy Scripture, does not really obscure this insinuating truth.

So the traces of modern atheism and agnosticism coexist with the remnant theology of the medieval world. Broadly speaking this elusive and rhetorical mixture continues to make the play the problem it is. Faced with the reality of regicide, fratricide, incest, adultery and a ghost from Purgatory asking him to take revenge on the evils committed, Hamlet’s nature in the master edition remains double, and his devotion to Christian doctrine overshadowed either by the barbarity of a ruthless desire to take revenge, or to stand above the human condition as if he were entirely detached from it, in the manner of a polished, self-conscious Renaissance man, asking purely rhetorical questions, as in the case of this speech from Act II,ii:

"What a piece of work is man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, 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?"

There is an allusion here to the eighth Psalm, and to the Ash Wednesday liturgy of ashes to ashes and dust to dust - which is revisited in the "alas poor Yorick" scenes - but this is, importantly, a rhetorical question. Everything about the medieval world is now being questioned. Although Hamlet remains critical about the question of the ghost’s identity - and willing to regard him as an emissary from Hell if the play within the play does not succeed in affecting his uncle’s conscience about the murder - his famous lines as his desire for revenge increases are proof positive he has made an alliance with Satan:

"’Tis now the very witching time of night,
When churchyards yawn and hell itself breathes out
Contagion to this world. Now could I drink hot blood,
And do such bitter business as the day
Would quake to look on"

- as when he refrains from murdering his uncle when his uncle is confessing his sins and repents entirely, because he does not want him to go to Heaven, or when he describes himself as a scourge (from Hell, presumably) and minister (of salvation, presumably), and when he is full of self-hatred at the fact that he has not the courage to execute the bloody deed of vengeful murder. Similarly "O, from this time forth/My thoughts be bloody or be nothing worth". This is not the recommendation of Our Lord, who preached forgiveness of sins! Further signs that he is a soul who has abandoned his moorings, desperately trying to legitimize the idea of murder which is merely personally repugnant to him, come with the two famous quotations from Holy Scripture. He tries to justify the decision to murder his father as willed by God and part of the overall design of the universe, a sign of Divine Providence, "There’s a divinity that shapes our ends,/Rough-hew them how we will". Later he piously cites St. Matthew with "There is special providence in the fall of a sparrow", as if to convince himself his actions might have divine sanction. Hamlet here is suffering the consequences of disordered concupiscence, which is why he is more a man of volcanic passions than a recollected soul, and it is the reason why we regard with suspicion his attempts to legitimize his action by citing Holy Scripture. There is now a gaping chasm between thought and action, and the two are at war with one another.

THE FIRST QUARTO

Another edition of the play is known as the First Quarto, possibly reconstructed from performance and usually judged to be inferior to the master-text we all use. This version was first published in 1603 (before the second Quarto of 1604-5 and the first Folio of 1623). Scholars talk about its "relative crudity". For this reason, the First Quarto is known as the ‘bad’ quarto. The edition is only really known to experts, theatre directors and scholars, and is only occasionally edited for general release, most recently by Kathleen Irace for Cambridge University Press in 1998. CUP is bringing out First Quartos of all the major plays, so this is certainly a new area and should be followed closely. In print so far we have the First Quartos, not just of Hamlet, but of King Lear, Richard III, Taming of the Shrew and Henry V. The Hamlet First Quarto was only rediscovered in 1823 and has been edited a mere three times in the twentieth century. Since discussion is in the early stages, there is much controversy still about its status, relative to the master-text, and then about relatively cosmetic things like spelling. Scholars are establishing parallel texts so that the various editions can be compared. A clear view about its meaning has still not emerged. It was originally performed at Oxford and Cambridge, presumably to student audiences.

I shall be arguing that it is a completely distinct play in its own right, and different to the play we all know and love, first and foremost because its Catholicism is absolutely central, and because the Faith is not engaged in a full-scale war of attrition with a Satanically inspired, amoral barbarism as is the case in the Hamlet we know better. Whereas the master-text is thought to be great and a "problem" play from the point of view of a coherent interpretation, we can show that the First Quarto is less ambitious in literary terms but more profoundly coherent; less a modern drama than a medieval mystery play, since it often expounds the eternal truths of Catholic doctrine in a simple, and uncomplicated fashion. It has not had the attention it deserves from Catholic critics. All the Catholic commentators of Hamlet like Fr. Peter Milward S.J., Fr. Christopher Devlin S.J., or Roy Battenhouse et. al. do not take the First Quarto seriously, which appears to be such a fund of unadulterated Catholic doctrine. They refer instead to the standard edition.

The First Quarto is about half the length of the Folio edition. Its structure is more simple and linear. The principle instigator of evil in the play is still Hamlet’s uncle, who is only temporarily granted the respite of repentance, since he goes on to set up the final scene in which his wife, Hamlet and Laertes all die, his motive being to purge the realm of threats to his illegitimate crown. Hamlet is still seriously intent on taking revenge on his father’s murder, at the behest of the Ghost from Purgatory and he also still kills Laertes’ father by accident. But this Hamlet also positively believes in God; he can be much more compassionate and merciful; he believes in the Four Last Things; is instrumental in bringing his mother to repentance for her sin of adultery; prevents Horatio from committing suicide; and dies forgiving Laertes his sins. The signs of the disorder and tendency to radical barbarism are nowhere in evidence. The play actually has the virtue of simplicity. Hamlet respects the medieval world order of the Catholic faith, and, importantly, is not seriously tempted to overthrow it. The lines about him as scourge and minister are not included. We can safely say that at times in the Quarto edition Hamlet is not just in a state of grace, but able to redeem sin in the world as a minister of salvation. In the famous "To be or not to be" soliloquy the text is completely different to the one we know, including a specific acknowledgement of a personal God; of a personal judgment and Heaven and Hell, of the theological virtues of faith, hope and charity. This is the most significant example of a contrast and is proof positive that the Hamlet of the First Quarto is a profoundly Catholic man and the play a vehicle to promote the Catholic faith. Before examining this soliloquy in detail, we can begin by acquainting readers with the scheme of the first Quarto to provide evidence for the general claim that this Quarto is saturated with a familiarity and sympathy for Catholic doctrine and a profound sense of sympathy for the sufferings of Recusant Catholics in Elizabethan England.

1. Hamlet laments his father’s death and his mother’s swift second marriage

At the beginning of the play Hamlet is entreated by his mother and step-father not to return to Wittenberg. This concrete allusion alone implies that Hamlet was dabbling with the ‘new’ faith, as Wittenberg was the German University associated with Luther at the time of the Reformation. Later on in this edition he says he is reading ‘heresy’. This could have a period meaning in only one way. Hamlet’s father was a King, a divine being according to the medieval world view and the theology of St. Thomas Aquinas. Now Hamlet’s father has been murdered. What greater sign of hatred of divinity than to assassinate the representative of God in society? The usurper King is in a state of mortal sin because he has committed regicide and fratricide. This loss of moral order at the apex of society becomes in turn the trigger which causes the hierarchical order to disintegrate. And this causes confused souls to reach out to novel alternatives, given the apparent failure of the Catholic faith to uphold and protect society as a whole. Vulnerable and confused souls entertain conversions to the Protestant ‘faith’. If we bear in mind that many in Shakespeare’s audience were suffering for the Faith as Recusants, because of the sins of their monarchs, living with considerable internal and external pressures in order to preserve the Faith, it is obvious that the new ‘Church of England’ represented a grave temptation. Indeed families were rent asunder by the conflicting loyalties and the purely worldly pressure to conform. Some suffered to preserve the old Faith, and others converted for all the material benefits and security that membership of the State church would confer. Our Lord’s prophecy that brother would betray brother and a father his child, that children would betray their parents and have them put to death was literally true in the Elizabethan and Jacobean period, as families were often divided by the very question of truth and allegiance.

In his first soliloquy we are encouraged to see Hamlet as in a state of despair, a mortal sin, because of the collapse of the old world order:

"O that this too much grieved and sullied flesh
Would melt to nothing,
Or that the universal globe of heaven
Would turn all to a chaos! O God,
Within two months – no, not two – married mine uncle. O let me not think of it."


His first major speech does not include the reference to suicide, as discussed above. Instead it identifies the attraction, not of the Protestant faith, but of something worse, nihilism (the desire that Heaven could intervene to turn all into chaos), in the face of moral anarchy. Here, the fact that his beloved mother - a Queen - has defied all modesty in two ways: by marrying so swiftly after the death of her husband, and by marrying her brother-in-law, which was tantamount to incest, according to Leviticus, as Hamlet says: "O wicked, wicked speed, to make such/Dexterity to incestuous sheets,/Ere yet the shoes were old.." The allusion would have had other echoes in Shakespeare’s day. Henry VIII maintained to the Pope that he was living in an incestuous union with Catherine of Aragon, who had previously been married to his brother, a claim the Papacy said had no validity because the Church had already granted Henry the right to marry Catherine on the grounds that her own marriage to Henry’s brother had not been consummated. The Church had not overturned the Scriptural injunction in Leviticus not to marry incestuously because marriages are to be consummated and when they are not the Pope has the right to declare them null and void. Henry VIII’s insistence on ‘sola scriptura’ was a Protestant position at war with the Catholic view that the Faith is made up of Holy Scripture and Tradition, leaving interpretation of Holy Scripture to the living tradition made up of Church Fathers, Doctors and Popes. Rev. Fr. Nicholas Sanders’ classic account of the Anglican schism of 1581, available to Catholics of Shakespeare’s day (recently reprinted by TAN), and on which St. Alphonsus of Liguori draws in his Refutation of the Heresies, also included the claim, widely believed at the time, that Henry VIII had been sleeping with Anne Boleyn’s mother before he embarked upon his more celebrated adulterous (and thus incestuous) affair with his own daughter, a tour de force of moral depravity. Hamlet’s revulsion at his mother’s behaviour would have struck a number of clear chords with his audience.

Hamlet wishes to dissolve into nothing, although, significantly, not necessarily to take his own life in an act of suicide as the first line in the soliloquy reads in the Folio edition. Hamlet here universalizes his personal despair and presents the attractions of Hell and the temptations of the Devil to the anguished soul when he wonders whether Heaven could intervene and turn all into chaos. So his first soliloquy hardly produces any evidence whatsoever for the claim that the man Hamlet in the First Quarto play is Catholic. On the contrary. And yet the temptation to nihilism is not in the ascendant, as it is in the other edition. Indeed, as we will show, it is finally eclipsed by a true, Catholic faith.

The new, usurper King is also linked with other signs of disordered concupiscence. His court has become a centre of carousing and revelry. In historical accounts of the impact of Luther on German life these points about the overthrow of traditional, orthodox doctrine were regularly made: there was a drastic and dramatic increase in sin of all kinds. Drunkenness is always a mortal sin, and in the new world order it is being flaunted by the King and his court, as if it were not. "At night we’ll feast together" the new King says.


2. The character Polonius is Corambis

Before Hamlet is introduced to the ghost of his father in this version – that scene came later in the Folio version – the character Corambis enters, who is identical with the later version’s Polonius. The word Corambis is punningly derived from the well-known Latin proverb "Crambe bis posita mors est" - which means cabbage served up twice is death, a cryptic comment on Shakespeare’s low view of the man, whom most commentators believe was based on Burghley, Queen Elizabeth’s first minister, of the Cecil family.

Corambis is a courtier, referred to later as "the chiefest pillar of our state", possibly in league with the new king on the condition that he not reveal the truth about how he illegitimately gained the throne. Corambis, like Polonius nearly word for word, produces his same masterpiece of secular wisdom, the truisms for his son Laertes about how to be wise in the world. A Catholic audience, bearing in mind Our Lord’s words that "what is folly in the eyes of God is wisdom in the eyes of man, and what is wise in the eyes of God is folly in the eyes of man", would have immediately recognized the subversive quality of the new world order’s view that: a. survival is the principle of life, and, b. that truth is not derived from Revelation, but a product of human reason and experience. Corambis produces the classic apology for opportunism, probably an attempt on Shakespeare’s part to pour scorn on all the handbooks in circulation on how to be a successful courtier. The pious "This above all, to thy own self be true" means only one thing, coming as it does after a series of banal warnings about taking the safe, middle path of non-commital "values" designed to secure personal advantage and survival.

Corambis believes that life is a performance art; that we do not know or need to know either ourselves or each other in any meaningful sense; that God is irrelevant; that "values" are personal choices and constructs; that the life of a courtier is merely a game of deceit and cunning. What friends need to be forced to be friends? Why should Laertes be told to "grapple them to thee with a hoop of steel"? The language of coercion and force suggests the new friendships are contrary to nature. These precepts cannot hide their own bankruptcy and are largely negative. Laertes is told not to argue, not to dress too flamboyantly and so on.

Now Shakespeare had witnessed the rise of a new class, those courtiers who had supported the new monarchs in their quest to break with Rome and establish an autonomous Church. He had seen the creation of a new class of men who were professionals at the game of life, motivated by personal ambition and rivalry, rather than the feudal idea of selfless service to a monarch viewed as divine. Indeed, feuding between rival families became ubiquitous under James I. He had seen the creation of a new underground and overground network of Government spies who had infiltrated the English College of Rome and the seminary at Douai to find out the names of those Jesuits who were willing to risk their lives, acting as undercover priests, to take the sacraments to the faithful in a state governed by terror. Most Catholics must have been revolted by Walsingham, Coke, Bacon, the Cecils, and all the other ‘new’ dynasties who owed their new found influence and wealth to an apostate monarch. In their own pseudo-urbane way Corambis’ battery of precepts founded on the principle of self-love were a powerful and cynical insight into the new, godless world of English politics, and the hatred of Christ which was fuelling it. The "something is rotten in the state of Denmark" idea directly applied to England. Once again, this part of the play supplies no direct evidence of Catholic doctrine. On the contrary, Catholic doctrine is being overtly subverted before our eyes. Yet Catholics would not have been seduced by the self-conscious but deeply boring ‘wit’ of Corambis; they would have known that it represented a corruption of Our Lord’s teachings about true wisdom. When he is dead Hamlet removes him from the stage saying he is a "foolish, prating knave" - rather a charitable comment, all things considered.

(To conclude in the next edition)


Dr. Murphy is a lecturer in German and European language and literature. She has taught at University College Dublin, University College Cork and Warwick University. Her last contribution to Christian Order was "Curriculum Wars and the New Philistinism" in the October 2000 edition.