Hamlet - Is There Spirituality?

Hamlet – is there Spirituality?

To what extent is spirituality woven into the fabric of Shakespeare’s tragic drama Hamlet? This essay proposes to answer that question.

David Bevington, in the Introduction of Twentieth Century Interpretations of Hamlet, finds a very obvious spiritual dimension to the drama:

According to popular Elizabethan belief, both Catholic and Protestant, spirits from the dead could indeed “assume a pleasing shape,” in order to abuse a person in Hamlet’s vulnerable frame of mind and so lead him to damnation.[. . .] Hamlet must face the ghost once again to explain why he “lets go by Th’ important acting of your dread command”; yet his purpose in confronting Gertrude with her weakness is the laudable one of returning her to at least an outward custom of virtue.[. . .] Hamlet has always believed that heavenly justice will prevail among men: “Foul deeds will rise, Though all the earth o’erwhelm them, to men’s eyes” (6).

The spiritual aspect of the play is made apparent in the second scene when Hamlet wears black to the courtly celebration in the room of state in the castle of Elsinore. His motves for this are spiritual in nature. The first soliloquy, or “act of talking to oneself, whether silently or aloud” (Abrams 289), occurs when the hero is left alone after the royal social gathering. He is dejected by the “o’erhasty marriage” of his mother to his uncle less than two months after the funeral of Hamlet’s father (Gordon 128). His first soliloquy emphasizes two religious/moral themes: the corruption of the world at large, and the frailty of women – an obvious reference to his mother’s hasty and incestuous marriage:

O, that this too too solid flesh would melt

Thaw and resolve itself into a dew!

Or that the Everlasting had not fix'd

His canon 'gainst self-slaughter! O God! God!

How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable,

Seem to me all the uses of this world

Fie on't! ah fie! 'tis an...