C - “Confessional”

 

After escaping from the “Mousetrap” play, Derek Jacobi’s Claudius stalks off to his personal chapel and hides in the confessional—the very same one from a few acts earlier in which Richard Briers as Polonius extracts information from Kate Winslet’s Ophelia. Setting both of these characters’ “confession” scenes in a literal confessional serves to visually evoke the debated sacrament of Catholic faith during the Protestant Reformation in Shakespeare’s England. 

In Act 1, Claudius implores Hamlet to change his mind about returning to school at Wittenberg, the very university where Martin Luther wrote and posted his famous 95 Theses disputing the Church’s sale of indulgences for sin, an act that history would declare the inception of the Protestant movement in 1517. Scholar Stephen Greenblatt posits that Hamlet shows that “a young man from Wittenberg, with a distinctly Protestant temperament, is haunted by a distinctly Catholic ghost.” 

Old Hamlet’s apparition makes reference to his “doom” with language suggesting he is in purgatory, a very early doctrine of Catholicism. Meanwhile, Prince Hamlet, and even Claudius, wrestle with the new methods of personal faith. After his damning soliloquy (“O my offense is rank”), Claudius admits that “My words fly up, my thoughts remain below: / Words without thoughts never to heaven go” (3.3.97-98), showcasing some degree of doubt about the efficacy of the reformed means of prayer. 

On the other end of the spectrum, Ophelia is berated by her father in the confessional for being too familiar with Prince Hamlet, doling out judgement and demands like an unkind priest. Later, her brother Laertes remonstrates the “churlish (presumably Catholic) priest” who refuses to perform a full burial service for her due to her “doubtful” (possibly suicidal) death, which Catholics considered more grave an act than Protestants did.

The Reformation ripples through UK history into recent memory, and disputes like these between Catholics and Protestants have dogged places like Northern Ireland for decades. “The Troubles” of the 1960s eventually led Irish-born and Protestant-raised Branagh to write and direct his semi-autobiographical Oscar-winning film Belfast (2021) which portrays a working-class family living amidst the inflammatory religious and political strife of the time. 

Sources:

Cummings, Brian. “Remembering the Dead in Hamlet.”  The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Religion, edited by Hannibal Hamlin, Cambridge University Press, 2019, pp. 200-217

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