That elephant is England’s apostasy from the Catholic Faith which was being hammered home by the English government when Shakespeare wrote the play, around 1600 AD, and which was driving him to despair because he was a devout Catholic. So (1) Hamlet is the most puzzling of his plays for the mass of post-Catholic readers or theatre-goers or critics who have no inkling of the “Reformation” as being the greatest disaster ever to befall England.
I would like to think that this EC has anything at all to do with my traditional Catholic faith, or that it might impact, somehow, the “Resistance,” which this site seems to support. But, alas, I come up empty. What does the tragedy of the English Reformation have to do with the ongoing situation of the virtual collapse of the Roman Church? Why should I care that the play Hamlet may be a coded thesbian reaction to this event, or that Shakespeare might have been a devout Catholic, or that the character Hamlet may have been a Catholic, all in a knot over the tragedy of the Reformation? Why should I care at this point whether Shakespeare was Catholic, or that, per chance, he may have really been Francis Bacon or Christopher Marlowe, or God knows who else? How may England’s apostasy have fed into the present moment of Roman apostasy, or may have contributed to the decline leading ultimately to Vatican II? I’m losing the thread.
Topic: Eleison Comments - Hamlet equals Apostasy (no. 599) (Read 1889 times)