Nerditry! Hamlet and the Christian Perspective

I just read that there will be a new Hamlet movie featuring Emile Hirsch and Twilight director Catherine Hardwicke.

Interestingly enough, in an informal chat with Paul Dumol yesterday, my friends and I discussed Shakespeare's play in terms of its timeless wisdom and unabashedly Christian roots. While most people would not have considered Hamlet a particularly Christian literary work, through patient reading and careful synthesis, we determined that Hamlet may be considered as such for the following reasons:

In Act 1, scene 5, the Ghost declares, almost surreptitiously given the censors of the time, that he had come from Purgatory.

I am thy father's spirit,
Doom'd for a certain term to walk the night,
And for the day confined to fast in fires,
Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature
Are burnt and purged away.

There is the constant reference to the sacraments, as may be read in the same scene with the Ghost:

Cut off even the blossoms of my sin,
Unhousel’d, disappointed, unanel’d,
No reckoning made, but sent to my account
With all my imperfections on my head.
O horrible! O horrible! most horrible!

As Marty Barrack wrote in his article on Hamlet, ”Reckoning” is an archaic term for the Sacrament of Confession, “anel’d” for the Sacrament of Anointing of the Sick and Dying, and “housel’d” for the Sacrament of Holy Eucharist.

Furthermore, we have Claudius' penitential prayer in the 2nd scene, where Hamlet withholds taking his uncle's life in order to effect a more encompassing revenge:

O, this is hire and salary, not revenge.
He took my father grossly, full of bread;
With all his crimes broad blown, as flush as May;
And how his audit stands who knows save heaven?
But in our circumstance and course of thought,
'Tis heavy with him: and am I then revenged,
To take him in the purging of his soul,
When he is fit and season'd for his passage?
No!

Finally, there is the overt reference to the Gospel according to St. Matthew (Chapter 10, verses 28 onwards) in act 5:

"...there's a special
providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now,
'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be
now; if it be not now, yet it will come..."

While the above reasons are far from complete, the fact that a bunch of fairly literate, dashingly attractive people such as my friends and I chose to spend a great deal of the little time we have to hang out with one another on Hamlet tells me that perhaps a new Hamlet movie is not just inevitable, but appropriate. We just have to prepare ourselves to discuss, with intelligence, humor and grace, yet another interpretation of a classic work of literature.

After all, as the Bard wrote, "the readiness is all". Enjoy!

Advanced nerds may want to check out a snippet of "Try what repentance can": Hamlet, confession, and the extraction of interiority by Paul D. Stegner. Peter Goldman wrote a review of Stephen Greenblatt's Hamlet in Purgatory entitled Hamlet's Ghost: A Review Article, which contains several points of interest regarding the Ghost and the Christian traditions that permeate Hamlet.