Report on

1
Report on Hamlet and A Matter Tender and
Dangerous

• Presenter
• George Hsieh

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Introduction

• A. Motivation To raise the issue of the
  relation of the plays to early modern religious
  discourses.
• B. Religion presented in Hamlet is oblique and
  inconsistent.

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Introduction

• C. Thesis statement The religious inconsistency
  in Hamlet is able to be resolved from a
  historicist interpretation, and in which the
  context of Roman Catholicism, Neo-Stoicism, and
  Protestantism will be included to analyze
  Hamlets subjectivity.

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Roman Catholicism

• A. The language and theology of Roman
  Catholicism emerge most clearly in Hamlet in the
  princes encounter with his fathers spirit,
  where the Christian and specifically purgatorial
  context that Shakespeare creates for the Ghost is
  rather surprising

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Roman Catholicism

• B. The historical context of Roman Catholicism in
  the 16th century England.
• 1. The influence of Catholicism is undermined by
  the Reformation.
• 2. By presenting the Ghost scene, Shakespeare may
  want to establish a sense of distance between
  the world of old Hamlet and the official ideology
  of contemporary England.
• 3. Hamlets dilemma results from the conflict
  between the old society presented by the Ghost,
  in which he has to be a revengeful son, and his
  Renaissance self-conscience.

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Political Relation in Hamlet

• A. Renaissance court is a world of humanist
  learning, secular politics, and religious
  division, and the high aristocratic men are no
  longer bond to the old religious traditions.
• B. Being shaped by the Renaissance Reformation,
  Hamlet unexpectedly finds himself displaced from
  the center of the court and regarded as a
  potential enemy of the state.

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Neo-Stoicism

• A. Stoicism counseled self-adjustment rather
  than political activism and was dismissive or
  condemning of actual efforts to change the social
  order.
• B. An alternative offered by Claudius to Hamlet.

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Neo-Stoicism

• C. Stoicism plays as a refuge for Hamlet, but it
  never fully controls Hamlets behaviors. Hamlets
  instruction to the players in Act III implies
  that for Hamlet the theater is polity for
  which he prescribes an authoritarian government.
  However, by involving in the performance, in the
  world of the play the ideologies of Stoicism and
  humanism are failing more generally.

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Protestantism

• A. Wittenberf is the source of radical
  Protestantism, and by portraying the conflict
  within Hamlet, Shakespeare may thus refer his
  audience to a contemporary society in which the
  established church was thoroughly reformed and
  evoke Protestant associations against the
  medieval Catholic traditions still alive in the
  play.

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Protestantism

• B. The emphasis on individual conscience and
  freedom may derive from the Protestant.
• C. Predestination.
• D. Political Activeness according to the
  Protestant, the human subject of Gods grace was
  in fact less likely to be politically passive
  than to be active in the service of causes
  ratified by individual conscience.

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Conclusion

• Hamlet is characterized by the combination of
  religious radicalism and social conservatism,
  and the end of the play explains the difficulty
  of trying to establish the political bearing of
  Hamlets change, in which a revolution in the
  order of subjectivity assists him in bringing
  down a corrupt government but nevertheless
  confirms him as a defender of traditional
  aristocratic society.